When you've got to dance - fly!

In Transit

A few weeks ago, I had an amazing photo shoot with a few members of the Only Human Dance Collective. They're a dance group from the University of Toronto. It was a great experience, with some wonderful people. I finally got around to editing some of the photos, only a couple of days before my next shoot with them. I can't wait until Sunday for the next round.

This my favourite photo from the first shoot.

Never noticed... and it was right there!

Garamond f-i ligature
(from Wikipedia)

It's amazing... little things. I've been writing my thesis for the last few months using the wonderful typesetting language LaTeX. It does a great job of putting graphs and figures in the right places, producing beautiful equations and numbering them correctly, and providing accurate and well-formatted cross-references and endnotes.

It also does great typesetting. Little things that I've never noticed before--not until coming across this page completely randomly.

I got to learn about something completely new to me: ligatures.

Ok... It's not that I've never heard of them before. But I've never really put much thought into what they are, where they come from, and how pervasive (it seems) they are in my life.

So I opened up the PDF of this gargantuan document that I've been working on all summer. Lo and behold, there they are... All over the place! I zoomed in on the text and stared wide-eyed, like a child, at these little compound characters that had completely flown under my radar until now.

The really fascinating part is how things like this develop. Language--spoken and textual--grow and mutate over time. For different reasons things change. Sometimes the reasons are political or religious (in this case, dropping characters from an "out of vogue" pagan tradition or two) . Sometimes, it's just to make life easier (like developing compact characters so that scribes can transcribe more efficiently).

The cultural impact of evolving languages is an interesting one. I grew up in Quebec, where language has always been an issue--the mainstay of a culture that feels marginalized. The internet and SMS brings a whole new transformation of language (bastardization to some, innovation to others), and until today I wasn't sure how I felt about it all.

But now, the way I see it, it all fits into a grander societal and cultural growth. The kids of today--tapping away on cell phones and in online chat rooms--just took the same license as monks in the middle ages. No longer a stylization to simplify the reproduction of illuminated text, this new economy of typographic language means an immediacy to communication that is less accessible when you're worried about every punctuation mark and extra syllable. The dynamism and information content isn't lost, and the only downside is potential miscommunication as the norms of the new language structure develop. (But that's nothing new. Just look at some of the ligatures on that Wikipedia page. There are a couple of those that, if I saw them in a text, I wouldn't know what they meant. For example, the "ss" ligature looks like a "beta" to me, the science geek.)

I sense a parallelism here deserving of inquiry: A critical view of l33t speak as a modern-day echo of the middle-ages development of accepted typographic ligatures. Could be interesting.

And I wonder: What is the link between modern SMS texting and the shortcuts we take to write text messages quickly (and with as few characters as possible) and, say, the acceptable shorthand of scripting ligatures that allowed a monk to reproduce a ready-to-distribute manuscript just that little bit faster?

Miracle weight loss!

There's an interesting link via Boing Boing today about a reference kilogram that seems to have lost weight. It's the weight of a fingerprint lighter. Even stranger is that though a series of these reference kilos were made out of the same material, at the same time, and stored under the same conditions, the weights seem to be ever-so-slowly drifting apart. It's a real mystery and it's got physicists mighty confused. (To say "this one included" makes me sound a far better physicist than I know I am... not that the statement isn't true, however.)

The kicker: If reference kilos are losing weight, then, by comparison, we're all gaining weight. (I'm only about 500 micrograms heavier than I thought, but that doesn't mean I won't at least think about going to the gym later today.)

Between a rock and my place

There's so much pressure to show up in the lab these days. When I'm not around, certain people (most notably those higher up the academic food chain) naturally assume that I'm slacking off and partying it up on my paltry stipend earnings. Sure, I work in a lab and to actually collect data I need to come in. There are definite advantages to bouncing ideas off people, getting feedback, and working collaboratively. And now that the summer is over (as far as the university administration is concerned), there are weekly scheduled meetings and gatherings where even if attendance isn't exactly mandatory, it's certainly frowned upon if you don't show up.

So I've spent most of the summer "working from home". I'm not going to lie and say that they were all productive hours and there weren't days when you could legitimately say I was slacking off. But, especially lately, I've never had more productive days than the last month or so...

• wake up without an alarm (bliss!)
• kiss my love on the forehead, give her the option to sleep in (which she always takes!), and stumble in my pjs/bathrobe into the living room
• check email, catch up on a blog or two, and random web browse for 45 minutes
• make coffee (inevitably result: the rising of sleeping beauty at the sound of the grinder and fresh coffee scent)
• sit back down in the living room, laptop comfortably warming lap, coffee by my side and ready to work
• within 90 minutes of waking up I'm actually working (not commuting to work)
  

The next step... work! (while waiting for my sweetheart to let the caffeine kick in and slowly lift from groggy sleep haze until she inevitably--the wonderful woman she is--makes breakfast: anything from a bowl of cereal to home-made pancakes. Jealous yet?)

And work I did.

Over the holiday weekend I spent 30 hours writing a 38-page draft of the fourth chapter of my thesis. This past week, I edited down a paper according to the reviewers' suggestions and have cobbled together 80% of a draft for another from that leviathan of a thesis chapter.

But I was beginning to feel guilty and came into the lab today. (Not to mention, there's a seminar today and Rani is working all afternoon. Poop.)

And what have I done?

Nothing. Well... nothing much. Certainly nothing as concrete as "finished a paper":

• organized data to burn to backup DVD and erase from my laptop hard drive
• caught up with the other students in the lab, letting them in on all the little things I "figured out" this week
• organized a "study schedule" with another near-completion PhD student so that we can get together and actually sift through all the literature we need to know inside and out by the time we defend
• caught up with a good friend (and full-fledged scientist here in the lab) over lunch and picked up a little gossip about the departmental behind-the-scenes workings (kinda miss that inside knowledge, actually)
• asked a few people for help (i.e. to send me slides) for the "intro talk" I've got to give next Tuesday afternoon
• and, oh yes, wrote this post

It's nice to list all that stuff. At least it feels "real" now and not just like I was a social butterfly who didn't do anything useful. (And I won't argue if you say that at least one or two of those items are, technically, useful things that were made much easier to do by being here.) There's just something about the environment here: the cramped office space, the people that are more fun and interesting to interact with than just look at, the stress of knowing my supervisor might be around the corner and ready to pounce, the need to share knowledge vocally rather than writing it down as I know I should. It's kinda fun, but never feels particularly productive.

Ironic that: that coming in to work makes me feel like I'm working less, while staying at home in my pjs (or, like I did yesterday, taking my laptop to the pub for a few hours), makes me feel like working hard and actually producing something.

I like working at home better. It's more relaxing and I have complete control of what I do and how I do it. I can handle more stress in an environment that I'm actually comfortable being in. I feel like I actually get things done there.

Bumping into the ex

Definitely something I'm never prepared for. Especially when it's just around the corner from where you used to live together -- and when I'm accompanied by my partner who I live with now. It seems like there's so much to say about the years that have passed, but it equally feels that little has changed. And none of it is worth trying to get into on a street corner in the Annex.

Had me wondering for a while, "Has my life really not changed that much?" But, in the end, it was just the weird juxtaposition of being in an "old place" with an "old face" that made me feel that way. Of course life has got more complicated, I've grown up a lot, and I'm in a much better place now.

I've got my studies/career on track (despite the incessant moaning). My creative life has taken an upturn I never could have expected. Most important, though, I'm actually the partner I want to be -- rather than the one I thought I was being.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't any less a "good guy" back then than I am now. But I was just that kind of selfish only those in their early to mid 20's can be (and none of them know it). Just getting into the world, figuring out how it works, starting to carve a little hole in it to call your own, and still just a little too green to realise how little of it you'll ever really figure out -- makes you world-weary enough without being world-wise enough yet, and it's too scary just thinking about yourself that even when thinking about others it doesn't always work out 100% right.

I'm happier now. Much. And that's all that matters.

Weird dreams

I used to believe that dreams were prophetic. That was back when I also thought that I could project my "spirit" to the astral plane and spy on my parents, siblings, and friends without them knowing it. (I suppose it was a few years after I relied on Looney Toons for my understanding of physics and assumed that the reason I kept getting pulled down by gravity was that I didn't not believe in it enough.)

Last night I had a series of dreams. Of course, I only remember snippets. But they involved:

• writing to a deadline about to pass
• racing around in a convertible car on lonely highways and back roads, not a care in the world
• prepping for a photo shoot, having to deal with a prima-donna-esque model, and watching the sun go down (losing that "perfect timing" for the light and having to cancel the shoot)

I'm sure there was more, and I seemed to wake up repeatedly over an hour or two. But everything linked to the various stresses in my life these days, both in my academic (thesis) life and creative (photography) life.

Not to mention that little unspoken wish to just run away from it all and have seem "easy" for a little while.