Metamorphosism

Mission notes

On my home planet I was trained in slime mold.
I am a highly-trained slime mold specialist.
Anything you want to know about slime mold, just ask me. I'm your man.
I was sent to Earth as the slime mold member of our research team. That was the assumption. The culmination of years and more years of specialized training.
So when our anthropologist was eaten by dogs and they picked me to replace him, it came as a surprise.
It caught me unprepared.
Certain slime molds, the going gets rough, the individual organisms can band together into a sort of larger organism, the individuals specializing in certain tasks such as locomotion, protection (dying to form a protective "skin"), perception (forming a rudimentary light-sensing "eye") etc.
Humans, though?
With that caveat, here a couple observations.
Driving through their urban habitat yesterday, I observed a couple.
She was on the skinny side, with a lank blondish mullet hairdo that looked as if she cut it herself. About 35 years old. The man she was walking with, who seemed to be her partner, judging from body language, was recovering from a recent injury. This could be seen from the way he moved - large, round careful movements, with a larger space of vulnerability around him than humans normally have, moving his head slowly as if his eyes stuck out on 5-foot stalks and he had to be careful not to hit anything with them. Slow, careful steps.
Also, his head was completely bandaged except for one eye, with fresh bandages.
Just like this kid in a story I'm currently writing.
The woman was looking out for him. They appeared to be taking their first trip outside their apartment since his return home from the hospital. Get some fresh air. Some exercise.
She was losing patience with his whiny, overcautious demeanor and wished he would recover as fast as the heroes in movies. He was traumatized by a dangerous world and fearful of all its sharp edges, dirt and large, hard, noisy things full of momentum.
They stood there and waited for the traffic light to change.
Later, in the boardroom of an international organization, I observed a second couple. She was about 22 and beautiful. He was in his forties, small and appeared intelligent, well-educated and successful. Both were well-dressed. She entered the room from a door near where I sat and signaled to him where he sat across the room.
They communicated with hand signals and mouthed words. This proved insufficient for them, so she walked over to where he was and they had a whispered conversation.
Later they were standing by me talking. I couldn't hear what they were saying. But it seemed likely that they were having an affair, although they didn't touch, because she was wearing a man's watch. A small man's watch, as in the watch of a small man, the size and sort he would wear. Expensive, rectangular "doctor's watch", leather band. Too big for her, the band, she had it on the smallest setting, the last hole, and it still hung down loosely around the trapezium and pisiform bones of her hand, so to speak.
And women wearing guys' watches is at least as sexy as women wearing men's shirts.
Moreover: a human recently told me I was more attractive when wearing my reading glasses and should wear them all the time. This I did yesterday, when not driving, and had the following experiences:

Executive summary: a whole bunch of women made contact with me. Conclusion: either glasses cause women to talk to me, or they've been doing it all along and I didn't notice before because I wasn't wearing glasses.

A woman in her early forties (blonde, attractive, well-dressed, nice shoes, red mini-dress, elaborate diamond/gold ring on the ring-finger of her right hand i.e. married as that is the custom in Austria) came over to where I sat in a low chair in the lounge working on my Apple iBook and asked if the seat next to me was taken. I replied that it was not, to my knowledge. She then said, "cool computer," and crossed her legs in such a manner that the battery charge on my iBook instantly increased from 28% to 35%. I responded by smiling and saying, "heh."
Then I returned my attention to the work I was doing on the iBook. No further conversation ensued.
Between five and ten minutes later, the woman rose in what struck me as an abrupt manner and walked briskly towards the elevators and out of my field of vision, her nylons throwing sparks sufficient to light a medium-sized room or power an electric razor, and the heels of her high-heeled pumps making clicking noises although the floor was carpeted.
I feared she was on her way home to kick her dog.
I missed dealing with slime molds and wondered what else I should have said. I wondered whether I should have replied, Yes, and you're pretty, and my batteries will be dead in 45 minutes but you'll still be pretty. (I decided not).

Later, it occurred to me that the events had progressed in an optimal way because here I had said nothing at all and still pissed her off, some relationships are better off dead you know?
Later, two women in the conference, after checking me out for a long time, asked me if I were someone else. I replied that no, I was me, and apologized for that fact. The first one left without further incident, the second felt the need to explain that she had been given the description of a man who must be my cousin and gave me this hand shake/hold/squeeze thing humans do sometimes at funerals when they are consoling someone. It felt out of place.
Afterwards, I wondered whether I could have gotten more entertainment out of the situation by telling her, when she mentioned the description/cousin, Oh, you must mean George Clooney, that happens all the time.
I concluded, probably not.

Reporting live from inside the ABC conference on XYZ

A large, WIFI-equipped conference room full of highly-educated, highly-trained diplomats; and one blogger (that I know of, there could of course be more, we're all over). The distinguished delegate from, from... from a Baltic country, okay? walks by and everyone goes, Hey, strappy size 38 (European) Manolo Blahnik pumps. That was yesterday. She was too distracting so I sat somewhere else today. Apparently she's into the shoes, she had on these pointy black Batman villainess things today, little bootlets from the front, all straps in the back. Long natural blonde Baltic hair. Pretty in a haughty round-faced Nordic Eicca Toppinen way.

Anyway. All these educated people debating topics vital to international security and the distinguished delegate from Ahem is distracting us so we sit somewhere else today, behind the delegation from the Republic of Supermodels, purely accidentlly, and their distinguished delegate likes to plant herself right in front of me, back to me, and bend over at the waist to discuss policy with her low-seated colleagues.

It's a hard life.

A brief remark on playing the cello

Had a cello lesson recently, expected my teacher to flay me over my playing at our first concert, instead he got out a Romberg piece for the class recital end of May.

I'd tried it earlier, months ago, to my dismay. It's a romantic piece, towards the schmaltzy end of the spectrum, and sounds awful without vibrato; also there are plenty of fast bits that threw me back then.

Sounds better now. Am beginning to vibrate, and the fast bits aren't as fast as the fast bits I am just shy of being able to play in the orchestra, meaning it is feasible that I will be able to master this by the end of May. I mean, of course I will master it.

Last weekend? At orchestra camp?

Orchestra weekend statistics:

• Violins flattened by falling piece of wood propped up against bathroom doorframe because motion detector kept turning on fan the noise of which disturbed the third violins rehearsing in that room: 1
  
• Exploding double-basses: 1 (A woman knocked her instrument against a chair and the back split off).
  
• Hours I thought I might be having a heart attack because I mistook my back pain (from tension and sitting and playing cello for hours and hours) for chest pain: approx. 24 I told Beta how much I loved her, just in case.
  
• Number of doors in my room: 0 (the hostel was under rennovation. I stole two mattresses and used them for doors instead. Less dangerous than big boards.)
  
• Number of nights I woke up at 3 and couldn't fall back to sleep because the other guy in my room was snoring: 1. At breakfast I asked him how he had slept and he said he thought okay, and asked if he had snored and I said a little and he said, I must have rolled over onto my back, you should have just gone, TsTsTs and I would've woken up and rolled back over onto my side and I said, I'll remember that next time.
  
• Number of evenings I sat around with the other adults (there turned out to be about ten or so of us, both teachers and "musicians") talking, and drinking, more drinking than talking as I waited for something to occur to me to contribute to the conversation, and then someone makes fun of turtles as pets and I go onto a 30 minute monologue about what great pets tortoises make (which monologue is cited with humorous effect during the following night's conversation): 1
  
• Number of times I grabbed my wonderful co-cellist and dragged her out to my car and showed, then demonstrated my tin whistle to her (because tin whistles had come up in a chat we were having), while my aura stood beside myself watching and shaking its head: 1
  
• Number of women who think tin whistles are hot instruments: ?

Beta and I enjoyed the weekend and got a lot out of it, I think. We concluded that musicians are cool. The kids were well-behaved. There was a pub attached to the hostel. I built a bonfire where the girls roasted bread dough on sticks, and the boys wrapped their dough around their sticks, added dough testicles and went hr-hr-hr. The orchestra sounded good in its first public performance/rehearsal/whatever, in a freezing cold church. A musician's life is a hard one, don't let anyone tell you different.

If an orchestra is composed of disparate sub-organisms/organs that work together to produce the effect of a larger organism, then the conductor is the eyes, ears and brain (ours impressed me very much). The harp, I think, is the glitter gland, showering the rest of us with wonderfulness. The double basses provided the heartbeat.

I felt like the ass.

The Albinoni piece we placed went well. Mozart (Mitridate) was going well, until I thought to myself, THIS IS GOING WELL! whereupon my mind went blank and I turned into a mime. What's THAT one doing honey, fighting an invisible wind? Climbing an invisible staircase? No, he's trapped inside an invisible box. Or wait, he's playing the cello.

My problem, at times, was the notes were too fast for me. At other times, it was trying to devote 50% of my attention to the conductor, 50% to my sheet music, 50% to my bow direction (to avoid stabbing someone or getting stabbed), 50% to turning sheet music pages at the right time, and 50% to not getting confused by my cello teacher, who sat next to me but played the 3rd violin part on his cello because I gather we had too many cellos and not enough violins.

It is a lot of fun.

Little-known facts about the jellyfish

• The jellyfish is more graceful in water than on land.
  
• According to one website, most jellyfish are asexual, but the author goes on to say that means the jellyfish have both male and female sexual organs, so they probably mean hermaprodites, and some hermaphrodites probably get more sex than lots of people, but in fact, some jellyfish actually are asexual, if you know what I mean.
  
• People often think the jellyfish thinks it's soooooo smart all the time because they mistake its shyness for haughtiness, but it actually doesn't think so.
  
• The idea of going away to an orchestra workshop for a weekend ends up freaking the jellyfish out way more than an orchestra workshop could actually freak anyone out, in reality, despite the prospect of sitting in the string section getting stabbed by the bows of 12-year olds (and stabbing them as well) and the jellyfish knows this, and so despite the freakedoutness it also looks forward to the camp, because nothing could be as bad as it is fearing, so no matter how it turns out it will be better than it currently is in the head of the jellyfish, unless the jellyfish drops dead or something, in which case the jellyfish will be dead, so who cares? Have fun at the orchestra camp, is it's motto. To the extent that fun with kids is legally possible.
  
• Assuming the jellyfish can actually find the camp, since all it has are vague directions downloaded from the Internet and a capable but snarky 16-year old navigator.
  
• The jellyfish remembers, though, that there will be at least two hot adult women at the workshop. Relatively hot, anyway.
  
• The jellyfish is a rather simple organism.
  
• The jellyfish's main opening is its mouth. In fact, eating is the jellyfish's main source of pleasure, but not in any weird way. It just happens to enjoy it. Other people watch the jellyfish eat, and it makes them hungry too, the depth of the jellyfish's enjoyment. The jellyfish should be in advertising.
  
• Some people think the jellyfish is, or started out as, a collection of disparate organisms that somehow came to work together, each specializing in one function - you do the locomotion, you do the eating, you handle the existential questions, I'll be responsible for reproduction, like that.
  
• Which is actually quite fascinating and makes you wonder if humans are like that too, and identity is just an illusion. Here, says the brain, I'll handle the thinking.
  
• Sometimes the jellyfish thinks there's nothing more beautiful and varied than rain.

Gamma's house

Here is a picture of the house Gamma and I built over Easter. It is in our back yard.
Click on the small image for a much larger one, if you're interested.

My wife and I also bought a piece of furniture for our bedroom, which holds CDs and has a flat area on top upon which our CD player just barely fits. I was shocked to discover upon unpacking it that it came pre-assembled. Our CD rack, I mean, not the house. The house we had to assemble, believe me. I had the walls 75% up when my wife asked whether I was sure the roof would fit, with the overhang and all, back there by the neighbor's house. Of course I had not considered that, but it happened to just fit.

Easter in Austria

How I spent my Easter vacation over at Lost in Transit.

Quartet

The other day? At orchestra rehearsal (our motto here at metamorphosism.com: "Putting the hearse back in rehearsal")? This guy? This other grown man who also plays in the orchestra? And has a daughter playing in it as well, like I do? Only he plays bass and his daughter plays cello? And not he plays cello and his daughter harp, like me? He asked me if I wanted to play in a string quartet with him? For grown-up pikers like us? And I was all, yeah, excellent, just not until fall cause this orchestra thing is stressing me out enough already? And he was all like, of course, same here? And I was all like, to myself, excellent, this can mean one of only two things: either my playing is getting better, or the orchestra is drowning me out, either way I don't have to worry about the orchestra concerts coming up in a week or two?

The quartet, of course, will be another story entirely.

Little-known facts about the flying fish

• The flying fish is not picky, living in all oceans. The major ones, at least.
  
• The flying fish flies to elude predators.
  
• They can glide at up to 60 kilometers per hour, and although usually their flights are short, they have been seen gliding for hundreds of meters, using the updraft on waves.
  
• This sounds an awful lot like surfing, which is done for fun, not to escape predators, man.
  
• When it was a kid, the flying fish's favorite TV program was "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea," mostly because of the flying sub.
  
• After a stupid argument with someone it loves, the flying fish sometimes goes for a spontaneous walk.
  
• Walking along a creek at dawn, the world thunders in the flying fish's hearing apparatus like a busy airport next door to a tin-hammering factory.
  
• The noise dies down only gradually and the flying fish wonders if this was the way things were for its dad when he used to go for long walks at night when the flying fish was a kid, back when its dad was the age it is now, and is this a result of the age, and how were things between its parents anyway back then, it remembers them arguing about its dad coming home drunk a couple times, but doesn't know if he came home drunk a lot, if it was a bad phase, or if it was only a few times and its mom just blew it out of proportion, or if its father would agree that it was a lot, or too much or how anyone saw it. The flying fish remembers lying in bed and listening to them whisper, its mother's angry, accusing whisper and its father's drunken, jovial and impatient-growing whisper, and doesn't notice things are getting quiet until it notices it can hear a swan making swan noises, and ducks quacking.
  
• It wonders, did walks calm its father this much? Walks at night? Are they as good as walks at dawn, the flying fish wonders. Because the light at dawn, not bad man. The clarity, the shine of the world. The swans. The way ducks look small and insufficient next to a swan, although they probably think the swans are way too big and prone to bird flu and a bad color - white - that gets dirty way too easy, while the swans maybe think, eat my wake, duck.
  
• And the flying fish has internalized Sigmund Freud, which is a big money-saver since this way every internal conversation saves it a hundred bucks. The flying fish says, I don't understand women, Sigmund, and Freud just laughs and laughs.
  
• Freud says, your problem is, she's right about everything and you don't like it because you're a judgemental misogynistic nit-picker with a superiority complex. You must kill off your shadow souls. At this point, the flying fish notices that Sigmund Freud is not only Sigmund Freud. Being dead, Freud says to the flying fish, I meet a lot of shamans and shit. In fact, Freud looks a lot like that Carlos Santana peyote guy Don something. And he also looks Chinese. He looks at the flying fish and says, call me Dang Won. Or Dong Wan. Up to you. After all, you internalized me, not the other way around.
  
• The flying fish looks closely at Sigmund/Dong Wan and notices he also looks a bit like its, the flying fish's, inner child. So it talks to him. If it can get a word in edgewise, because the flying fish is polite and not prone to interrupt conversation partners. Freud/Wan is telling the fish to kill all its shadow souls. All the things it is not. It will be a real bloodbath, he says to the flying fish.
  
• You are good at heart, says Freud. But it is constricted and barely beating like the small rubber core of a way-old softball battered and repaired with layers of tape until it is twice its natural size. The fish replies, look at that sunrise would you, and smell that air. And look at that duck flying up the creek a foot above the water, flying like it's late for a job interview.
  
• The flying fish feels better already, no matter what the future brings.

Preferences

There is this German boy band. This German boy band.

Perhaps you are familiar with them, perhaps not.

I don't know how their music is. I saw them once on MTV, but didn't really listen.

Little girls hereabouts are quite hysterical over them.

They were the band Gamma loved to hate for the past few months. Her best friend at school hates them, so she did too. But there was always a certain fascination, you know what I mean?

They were interviewed on the radio and Alpha insisted on listening, to give Gamma an excuse to listen, grudgingly, and she did, with fascination.

Then we visited some friends, parents of Gamma's best friends from back in nursery school who have, guess what, 20 posters of this band in their rooms. The friends, not the parents.

And the band happened to be on a TV show that night. The dad had a big telescope and we looked at Saturn, which was amazing, but they only glanced and then ran back inside to watch the boy band and discuss various details of their existence.

Such as which one do you like best, the twin with long hair? The singer twin with the makeup? The other one?

When I got home last night, Gamma had bought two magazines with her own money and taped eight posters to her walls, as well as dozens of smaller photos she had cut out.

She wants a CD for her ninth birthday.

She wants to go to their concert when they come to town. I told her they were just in town. She wants to go next time they come. We'll see, we said.

She is so much happier now that she can stop pretending not to like them and just be a hysterical little fan.

Scientific method

We went to a thing with Gamma. At the university, this university thing for kids. Yesterday evening. She wants to do this summer university program for kids, and they had this introductory thing yesterday evening. They took the kids on a tour of the building. Before that, they sat in this room and explained the scientfic method to the kids.

It was so boring, there was nearly a riot. Poor kids. A lady from the radio interviewed Gamma, it was broadcast today, the first 10 seconds of her 15 minutes of fame.

But the thing got me thinking about, about the scientific method, and how I'm testing a hypothesis for the next two weeks. The hypothesis is, getting enough sleep will improve the quality of my life.

Very simple. Instead of getting up early and meditating and writing, I sleep until 5.45 AM and rush to work. Then at lunch, I walk somewhere and tell myself I'm meditating while walking.

Writing, ehn. Can't have everything.

I began research yesterday.

So far, after nearly sufficient sleep two days in a row ("sufficient" defined as 8 hours straight), I find myself more depressed than I have been in a long time. Otherwise, no great changes yet. One complication research has run into is my apparent inability to sleep past 4 AM. Two days in a row, I've woken up at 4 and tried to fall back to sleep until 5.45. This morning, I tried to meditate there in bed, figuring, either I meditate or I fall back to sleep, win-win. Then, after 20 minutes of that, I thought positive thoughts until it was time to get up and tinkered around in a great mood until I arrived at work, since which time see above.

I will continue testing this until the 2 weeks are up, and publish my results here.

Maybe even on a daily basis, if I can't think of anything else to write about.

Who knows. But there's always something to write about. I was looking at the newspaper with Gamma. She likes to read the paper. There was some article in the Sunday paper about male archetypes. They used various celebrities to illustrate the article, and I was quizzing her about which ones were cute. None of them were, not even Colin Farrel. But this one looks a little like you, she said, pointing at the picture of George Clooney, the Übersexual type. If she had an allowance, I would have increased it for her on the spot.

Also, this orchestra thing is stressing me out. I fear I'm going to have to fake an awful lot this time. Oh well. Who knows. Two weeks yet to go, two or three. I still might manage something.