Monthly Archives: January 2019

New Guitar

I’ll try to keep this short.

I bought a guitar. On impulse. I don’t know how to play the guitar. As a classical snob, I’ve always looked down on guitarists. But my broken cello remains broken for the time being, and ever since I’ve been itching to play music. Then my husband surprised me by taking me to Guitar Center.

He was actually there to pick up some electrical equipment, but my eyes filled with the guitars. Lines and grids and matrices of guitars, of all sorts and shapes and colors. Naturally I drifted to the acoustic section.

“Maybe I’ll get a cheap ukulele?” I tell my husband.

I find one cute ukulele, with a beautiful pattern.

“But what do you want this for?” my husband asked.

I thought. What was missing? Was this hope? “I want to make music, any music I want. I want us to start our band again,” I said.

“You want a guitar,” he said.

So I got a guitar. Because I’m a cellist, I picked one with an especially warm tone, almost all mahogany.

Moving to Seattle meant changing jobs, it meant changing careers, friends, food, standard of living, weather, everything. Might as well go with the tide. They say to avoid drowning, you follow the flow of the water.

“I want this one,” I said.

Missing New York

I tell myself it’s a waste of time to miss New York.

“Except for maybe bagels,” I say over a non-bagel breakfast to my husband.

Plus we got married in a Brooklyn book store. They always have the greatest authors visit there. Or the Manhattan book store where we had our second date. Of course that one is closing. What am I missing?

I don’t miss the subways. They have public transit in Seattle, too, but I have chosen to only go to places I can walk to (a privilege that was not feasible in New York). Those dirty, sweaty, creepy New York subways.

But what about that feeling of climbing the third flight of subway stairs out into the brisk cold of the city, on the way to Lincoln Center?

Or everything being a little old, a little broken? The dirty concrete. Surely I can live without those. And the air is certainly cleaner in Seattle.

I didn’t get to see Lion King on Broadway (no money). I didn’t get to go to Union Square for the Christmas Market (I’d moved). But what does that matter? Lion King will probably be open forever! And I live right by a better market that is open year round!

Is it me, or are the buildings not as tall? I used to wish I could see more sky. Now I see the sky… but it’s usually gray.

“This is a small town,” my husband says.

“It’s not a small town,” I say.

Comfort Blog

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a blog solely devoted to depicting comfort? Every morning you would drag yourself out of bed and debate whether you should make coffee or just die on the couch. Eventually you put the kettle on in preparation for the easiest coffee – french press. Then your favorite part of the morning begins. You walk to your ergonomic chair that cost you almost as much as your rent back in the day, sit down, feel your lower back begin to loosen, click the ergonomic mouse, and your computer wakes up – slowly, like you. As the monitor lights up, the rush of light propels you to open your favorite browser (Chrome, duh) and go to yourcomfortblog.com (is that a real website?). Gradually, the white changes to light pinks and blues and you see pictures of merchandise from your favorite movies (The Dark Crystal) and art featuring your favorite foods (cheese!). Then you get to the good part, the blurb. It reads like Virginia Woolf, but happy. It describes a big comfy t-shirt and a hot but not too hot cup of coffee made from thin air and some retro steam punk designed technologies that are still ergonomic (good, you like that). It describes the thoughts that go into writing and thinking and it all feels very meta the way a comforter feels very soft on the skin.

Your tea kettle clicks. Time to grind the coffee. Your morning visit with this paradise website is over. But never fear, because you have your light pink “Git it Gurl” shirt on over the fluffiest pajama pants you ever owned and you’re using your favorite light blue mug and you’re going to sit on your light blue couch and watch the steam come out of that Raven’s Brew coffee (which also sounds cool as a bonus) as the waves of puget sound rock in the far distance, outside where wind and rain exist.

But not inside.

Wouldn’t it be nice.

How to Think of a Computer

So we agree your smartphone is a computer. Did you know your flip phone was also a computer? Is your analog clock also a computer, or does that enter the machine territory?

I am going to try to talk about this in a way that requires no prior knowledge whatsoever.

This isn’t a technical blog (yet), but let’s introduce two definitions.

  1. A computer, according to Subrata Dasgupta’s “A Very Short Introduction to Computer Science” (which is an excellent book), is “the centerpiece of computing”, which is to say an organized system of programs.
  2. And a program, the interesting part of a computer for a Software Engineer, is (in my words) instructions to solve a problem in the form a computer can understand.

Sometimes those instructions are closer to the “10010101011” you see on cool t-shirts, and sometimes they are very close to plain english language.

Let’s go back to the analog clock. Your father had one. Maybe he still has one. It keeps track of time once you have told it where to start, right? How does it know that? Because it follows certain rules, like “after 60 seconds, move the minute arrow,” and those rules are translated (like a language) in the watch in physical cogs and wheels. When you use a watch, you notice is is 8:15 PM and you start the watch at that time. But without a software engineer solving the problem of “how do you tell time starting at an arbitrary time,” no one would know what to do with the cogs and wheels. That solution to that problem is the program.

That’s the argument that an analog watch is a computer. You may have noticed I entered dangerous territory here: now lots of things could be called computers, and lots of things could be called programs. It’s a Pandora’s box! That’s where the fun of being a computer scientist begins.

After all, the definitions I gave you were highly abstract. But there is power in abstraction! But you know what isn’t in abstraction? Concrete metal and wires and screens. That’s someone else’s job.

Because here’s the thing: as a Software and Data Engineer with a degree in Computer Science, people assume I am good with computers. Family members ask me for tech support. My dad wants me to resurrect his favorite video game that is out of print.

But what I do day to day is write programs. All I do is solve problems. Sure, I get my hands dirty with more machine-oriented problems, like overheating or the disorganization of the many machines a company uses, but my solution is, yet again,

  • instructions to solve a problem in the form a computer can understand.

So no Dad, I cannot write a game that no longer exists, not without a lot of connections, and no, I don’t necessarily know how to reroute the router (try googling it mom!). I don’t get my hands dirty actually touching wires. I’m not tech support. I’m not a gamer. I’m a computer scientist.

There’s a lot of beauty and poetry in what I do. I hope I have given you a glimpse of it.

Mugs

Mugs are very important to me.  As a child, I noticed they were more heat and cold resistant than glasses, and they always have that useful handle.  However my parents either bought mugs that were more tea cups – too thin – or there was their Starbucks mug collection, which was not so nice to look at.

So in my college years I began to buy cheap graphic mugs, things that said “I’m drinking this for your own protection,” or “I like a little coffee with my coffee.”  But these mugs still weren’t well-engineered, and honestly, not too funny.  So after college I began collecting mugs from my favorite shops as souvenirs, and only if they were well made – from the handmade ice cream shop, from the cafe, etc.  Although I had logos all over the place, I wasn’t yet happy.

Then as a wedding present, a friend of my husband’s gave us a handful of completely mismatching, handmade mugs.  The glaze reminded me of when I was really little, when an aunt of mine would take me to her kiln and show me her creations.  These mugs, though perhaps a little sloppily made, were nice and thick, well-designed, and the glaze was the real thing.  So I have started a new venture, that is of investing signigicant money (significant to me that is) in one beautiful, functional handmade mug at a time.

I have two so far. The aim is to eventually overwhelm the kitchen.

Wish me luck.

Measurements

A few years ago I paid for a lesson from a coffee professional.  She had a recipe she had perfected and she taught it to me.  When it was time to ladle out the coffee beans, I didn’t see a scoop.

“Where’s the scoop?” I asked her.

“You can just use your hands,” she said.

Now, this made it no less precise.  We were using a scale to measure exactly how many grams of coffee were going into this (it was the kalita wave technique, by the way).

So for the past two or three years, I have been using my hands.  Getting a handful, then controlling whether they poured out one by one or by the dozen.  My hand would get dirty.  I guess coffee is oilly.  I would have to wash it immediately afterward.

This Christmas my little sister got me a hand made wooden coffee scoop.  It was too cute not to use so I began measuring the grams, only using the scoop, and I realized that three slightly heaping scoops were almost exactly to the gram as much as the recipe required.

So for the past eight days I have been using the scoop, and I put away the scale.

This got me thinking.  It’s nice to work blind, but would it be as satisfying if I didn’t know scientifically that within a certain margin of error this was exactly how much coffee I wanted?  Yet I know, over time, I’m going to start using less, or more beans from scoop to scoop and I won’t go back and measure it later.  Plus, now I’m using it for the french press I got for Christmas, and that requires a completely different measurement.

I am a Computer Scientist.  That means I have a scientist’s brain but I like shortcuts.  Apparently it applies to coffee as well.  It doesn’t hurt that I am also an artist.  I like to improvise.  How can one ever reconcile these opposing forces?

I think the secret is to alternate.  Measure, plan.  Then throw it away.  Then take it out of the trash and compare.  Measure again.

In cooking, I learned from the very precise measurements of Maangchi, but most Koreans of the older generation (and my husband) don’t cook with measurements.  I started with Maangchi, memorized her recipes, and now I am adding flavors of my own.

After all – I want to be a astrophysicist.  After all that mathematics, they still take a picture of the sky, do they not?

New York to Seattle

New York is not neccesarily known as a sunny place, so I didn’t think the transition to Seattle weather would be too tough. Although in Seattle it is not nearly as cold in these winter months, it is dreadfully overcast. As a person with a mental illness, the lack of light – and we have more windows in this apartment than the last – is getting to me. There are now six lamps in the living room not counting the lights over the kitchen that came with the apartment, but those damn clouds just seem to suck the life out of those photons, synthetic or no. As a fan of Jane Eyre, I’m trying to turn this dreary weather into my new aesthetic where the dark colors and shadows and dampness highlight my stubborness to survive, but it’s no easy task.

One thing I will say: walking in the rain in a heavy coat with no umbrella is the thing here, instead of walking in the rain with a heavy umbrella and a light coat, as in New York. The rain here in Seattle is lighter, if constant, anyway. I hated having to carry around umbrellas before and I like now that it’s acceptable to be partially drenched and have frizzy hair, to embrace the inconvenience as a part of life, and when you come home, hang up your coat like in the old days to dry.

When will I stop missing New York? I don’t know. Maybe I just need to get caught in the rain a few more times.

January 2nd

Pearls before swine is my aesthetic.  I like to pair something really trashy or cheap with something more chique or valuable.  I once wore a legit corset and jeans with a blazer to school.  Now I’m more of a cheap patterned shirt with pearl necklace and jeans type.  I think it goes with how to spend the day after new years as well.  Mix the fact that you’re up at midnight today instead of yesterday with a taste of aged cheese you got from the local market.  Water crackers a must, especially since you should be showering.  Clothes optional.  Happy New Years 2.