The Other Shoe

As I walked to the Metro station this morning, I was listening to music on my little pod of music joy. I noticed about halfway to the station that the headphones weren't plugged in all the way. I plugged them in and the music soared! I completely failed to notice how tinny and bad it had sounded. It was only in the contrast that I realized.
Eventually, I got off the bus and headed to the office. Almost in the door, I realized that I hadn't taken the little headphone earbuds out of my ears, even though the music had stopped playing twenty minutees prior. I took them out, and felt better. Those things are uncomfortable! I could hear!
How many other things are like this in my life? How many half plugged-in headphones or unremoved earbuds do I have that I don't even know about? How many stoppers could I pull? How many things could I be seeing more clearly if I'd just remember to remove my sunglasses? How much better could I feel than I feel, if I could just find the switch?
Why is it that all of these thoughts happen during my commute? Do I stop thinking during the rest of the day?

Viral Marketing

I was walking on Newbury Street in downtown Boston with Erica the other day, ogling the passers-by by whom we were passing. We had this fantastic advertising idea: what if, say, the Gap paid people to walk around downtown and notice when you're wearing Gap clothes, then come up to you and say, "I love your jacket!" That would sure get people buying Gap clothes...
You see where this is headed. It turns out that the evil geniuses in the world of selling you shit already came up with this idea. The kicker for me is that they came up with it three years ago! There's a company called BzzAgent here in Boston that pays people to sell products to their friends in casual conversation. The idea is that you do this anyway: something like 25% of casual conversations contain some product reference. They just pay people to do it. There are caveats, of course, like you should tell your friends that you get paid to sell them shit, and people only sell shit they like. This does not make me feel any better about this being an industry. Not to mention that they thought of it three years before I did. Damn! I hate it when that happens!
We all know that advertising is evil. it's people trying to make you feel bad about yourself, to create voids in your life that only products can fill. What really gets me is that it seems like some of the great minds of our generation are involved in what's a fruitless activity, in terms of human advancement. Insurance agents and marketers keep better track of trends than research scientists, professors, and doctors. There's the real triumph of the free market. Can you hear me now?
PS You should all go out and buy the new Broken Social Scene album.

discussion question

Human beings are differentiated from other animals because we are the only species to make war.
Talk amongst yourselves.

changes - a rant

It's important to go into any relationship (romantic or otherwise) with the knowledge that you can't make other people change. I may have said this before, so I hope I'm not belaboring anything, but here I go. People do change, but it's never because you tell them to. At best, you can enact change in others by showing them a better way to do things, an alternative. At some point there's potential for it to dawn on people that their approach might not be as good as yours, and there's potential for things to be better. And they will subtlely change their life to be more like yours. We see this in fashion, advertising, but it also applies to domestic and interpersonal issues. It applies to everything. This is why you should live the life you preach; it's the only way to truly enact positive change in the world.
It's worth being careful around other people when they say that they've changed. Because even if you want to change, if you perceive a desire within yourself to be different, there's still a period of time before that desire is made manifest. You can want to change and remain the same. Or you can think that you've changed when nothing's different. I'm always leery when people say, "I've changed." That's usually an indicator that everything remains the same. The true change happens more subtlely; it usually it made apparent when somebody else tells you that something's different about you.
This applies to relationships, of course, because so many people do this cycle of breaking up and getting back together, on the premise that things are different now, that he or she or life or the world or your perception of it has changed for the better and that everything will magically work. We're getting better culturally at seeing that this isn't the case, for example, in the case of physical or sexual or verbal abuse. But not emotionally damaging situations. We're still stuck, culturally, on the idea that if all that happened was that somebody broke your heart or drove you crazy, without actually hurting you physically, you've still got a chance of making it together. I think it's worth possibly re-examining this notion. However, in the grand canon of notions that ought to be re-examined, this one takes a low spot on the list.

Things I learned on the bus today

It's nice to fall asleep on the bus ride home. There's no need to worry about missing your stop, because everybody gets off at Forest Hills. You can read your book until you get too tired/nauseated to keep reading (which usually happens around the Dedham Mall, halfway through the trip from Norwood to Jamaica Plain), and just close your eyes and drift off. Lean your head against the glass. But be careful! Because it turns out that when you really fall asleep, your head will flop dramatically, loudly and painfully thwacking whatever hard object happens to be in it's trajectory. And if that object happens to be the emergency window opening handle... Let's just say that you won't be dozing too much for the remainder of the commute.
I ride the subway for one stop to get from the Forest Hills bus station to the Green St. stop, near which one can find my house. The train stops at Forest Hills and turns around. Everybody gets off, the doors open and close and open and close and the train goes in the opposite direction beeping and rumbling, like mechanical Ouroboros eating it's own tail or some sort of Moebius strip. Today there was a man, a poor crumpled man with a cane folded over on the seat after everybody else had cleared out of the train. The conductor (apparently notified of the man's presence) was trying to get him off of the train. The man smelled of alchohol and was incoherent; another passenger had to assist the conductor in getting him off the train. The passenger smiled at me when he got back in the car. "Life," he said, "I guess he wasn't always like that."
I watched the movie Capote this weekend. The thing that was most striking about Truman Capote, at least in the movie, was his absolute selfishness. He would say any lie to anybody for the sake of him or his book. He seemed incapable of casting anything in his life in a different light other than that which emanated from him and for him. His lack of compassion was startling, dealing as he was with inmates condemned to death, prisoners who had no clear idea of why they'd committed their crime.
I feel the same selfishness. I saw this man on the train, and was struck because the only thing I could think to do to help the situation at all was to help move this man to a cold bench outside in the T station. And I didn't even help with that. I watched. I have no idea what put that man in that situation, but I knew that something could be done, that I could do something to help it. Standing there carrying thousands of dollars worth of electronic gadgetry, the picture of privelage, and I can't even conceive of how I'd help somebody so far out of the light I cast.
A subway worker was cleaning the railings on the escalator stairs as I walked out of the train, one stop and one world later. He stood in the middle of the escalator, walking down as the treads moved up, not moving in real space, wiping the railing clean with his rag. It's a minor magical force that allows scenes like this to happen. If I had his job, cleaning the escalator railing would likely be my favorite part of the day.

Intelligence carries with it a burden. It's hardly an original thought, but it's something into which I've run lately. Intelligence. When you're able to see a bigger picture, you're burdened by having to consider it in all of your actions. If only you could see each issue as only having two sides, or better yet, one side. If only everything had one finite answer! If only a sort of universal truth were achievable for any single question! But alas, it is not to be so, and so those who can fathom that an issue might not be resolved, that terrorism isn't the fault of all non-Americans, whose origin is to be determined by those in power at any given point in time, that there are several ways of mitigating natural disaster, that there is no pro-life versus pro-choice. It's all much more subtle than that. Of course. I'm preaching to the choir.
Sensitivity makes you pay a price. I'm sensitive to other people. I think about other people driving on the road, how well they're doing, making up scenarios for what might be causing them to drive the way they drive. I think about other people on the subway. I can make headaches go away, I can absorb that pain. But I can't let go of it. I'm too sensitive, not tough enough, and it takes a toll. I have to learn now how not to care about everybody, how to not absorb the negative energy of others, for my own sake.
Emotional depth makes you pay a price. You can spend your whole life pulling people in, needing this and needing that from others, and it can work for you pretty well, with only the occasional heartbreak, for which we have many outlets in this society. But try sometime *not* holding on to people. Try sometime just loving without expecting anything in return. You can find that you had a lot of assumptions that don't hold true. Even if you know it's the right way to act, you can feel like you're taken advantage of, because being selfish and needy is so much easier and so much more frequently done.
Isn't it ironic that doing the right thing just paves the way for those doing wrong to do worse? You can't be an honest politician, because the dishonest ones will smear your image or worse faster than you can say "Paul Wellstone." You can't love others freely, because those who love with strings attached will move in some day and want to take all of that love away from you, keep it for themselves. You can't address problems with multiple solutions in mind, because those who see in black and white will be more present in the debate with their extreme views. It's hard to tread fine lines. We're all treading such fine lines.

Bikes in Boston

Did I mention that I do my commute on a bike? At least, right now. As long as I can, that's the plan. it's faster and cheaper than the bus (well, maybe not actually that much cheaper, with bike maintenance included). In fact, provided that there's not a huge pile of snow around, everywhere in Boston is faster to get to by bike. Faster than the "T" (Metro). Faster than a car. Ever heard of Boston drivers? Massholes? Ringing any bells? So I'm really psyched about getting a bike.
Today I managed to get a nail embedded fully into my back tire on the ride home. Fortunately, I got the flat next to the one bike shop on the eleven-mile ride home. So I just walked in, and they say "Nice bike. Wanna borrow some tools and buy a tire and fix that flat?" Sweet. I was back on the road in 15 minutes. Which is nice, because the alternative is to wait for the bus, and go home dejected that my biking master plan has failed. Instead I just strolled in 15 minutes "late" with a story.
This bike I'm riding used to have a garage-door opener on it, back when it was at the apex of suburban bike glory.

Musicians have a certain power to insinuate themselves into your life. You could meet a guitarist, say, who happens to know a song that you love. And then he plays it for you, and you're hooked. That song has taken on new meaning for you. That song is now firmly attached to whatever it is he meant when he played it for you. Was he looking you in the eyes? How did that make you feel? You remember that every time you hear that song. Musicians have a power, when we mean to.
Sometimes you play a song, and you really see it when you're singing and you really mean it when you're playing. And sometimes you're just going through the motions. You can tell when a musician means it, because that's when you're paying attention. When they don't mean it, that's when you're sipping your drink, looking for somebody interesting to talk to.
When you write a song for somebody, you have that same power as the cover song, but with greater potential. That power to do harm or good. But you only have that power if the subject knows that the song is about them. It's amazing how a song that you thought was so personal as to be non-applicable to any new situation can be taken out of context.
I guess there should be a point to all of this. Nope. No point. Just an observation. Point withheld.

people

i've been thinking about holding people close. a lot of people in my life, myself included, have gone through some sort of dramatic personal life change lately, and it's typically got a lot to do with breaking up with other people. everybody's doing it. these things come in waves (why) they come in waves is a whole other blog entry).
i've been told that a lot of hurt in life comes from holding people too close. you hold people too close to you, and it inevitably hurts you during those times when they lean away from you. and everybody's got their threshold for how far that leaning away is. that's beside the point. the point is, the closer you hold on to a person, try to draw them into your life, the greater your potential to be upset if change occurs and they don't want to be with you anymore.
there's one thought. everything changes. no two people are ever going to end up the way they started. you have to deal with change throughout any relationship. change happens everywhere in life, which is ironic considering the human tendency to try to organize the inherent entropy of the universe. even energy tends toward randomness. how can you fight with energy?
but there's the other side of the coin. commitment. there comes a time with certain people where you can't afford to or simply don't want to have them be some floaty presence in your life anymore. you want them to be a big presence. in some cases, the only or the biggest big presence in your life. you want, in short, to draw them in.
but commitment and attachment aren't necessarily the same thing. you can be committed to somebody, but not require them to be in your presence, or require that they be so thorougly thinking about you 100% of the time. it's something that maybe we all know, certainly something that i know, but something that you constantly need to remind yourself is the case. because in my opinion, to have a successful commitment, you need to be exclusive, but not overly attached. it's a fine line to tread. a fine line indeed. at some point, you have to acknowledge that things will change between the two of you. energy tends that way. if nothing else, your perception of the situation will change as time goes on. little things will start to nag you, or big picture things will come to light and make you all the more wondrous at who you've got in your life.
the answer, then, is to create an environment where change is acceptable, and you change with those people who are close to you. you don't abandon them when you're tired, and you don't ignore them if they're trying to tell you something, verbal or otherwise. not if you're committed. but you don't close yourself off to change either. some of that change is going to be intentional, and some of it is going to be gradual and subliminal. when you're committed, you're going to end up in a new place from where you started. and that's what's beautiful about commitment: you get to experience your whole life and know that someone's going to be there to see it with you.
this makes less sense in every paragraph. maybe some other time.

Road Trip

So I talked about moving in to Boston. Well, the latest turn in the move-in was that last week (or was it two weeks ago?), I was going to stop by Potsdam for a weekend, grab a bit of stuff and come back down to Boston. Then my mom was like, "why not stay longer and drive your stuff home in my car?" I was like "Sure." Then my dad went "Why not grab some of the stuff for your apartment that I've got in Ottawa?" I was all, "All right." Then I remembered that I was supposed to go to a wedding in Milwaukee a day or so after I was supposed to come back to Boston. So I asked mom, "Mom, how's about I take your car to Boston, then drive it to Milwaukee and then back to Potsdam?" She was totally down.
I just got back from that road trip. Boston to Potsdam in the car with Danielle Cornett, sister Renee, and Becca D., all high school friends who happened to be going back home from Boston. Hang out in Potsdam. Get myself to Ottawa. Hang out with dad. Drive stuff down to Potsdam in dad's car. Drive all of my stuff to Boston in mom's car. Turn around the next morning and head toward Milwaukee. Stop at a friend's in Columbus. Wedding in Milwaukee. Back to Mansfield, Ohio. Then to Poughkeepsie, NY for a few days. Drive up to Ottawa, Canada, and then to Potsdam. Then take a bus back to Boston. I just got back.
So, it's been a relaxing lil' break for me. There are good pictures of it all, but I didn't take them, so you'll have to wait for them to show up at alexmarvar.com or something before you can see them. Aw, heck, maybe I'll post a couple... Later.
Congratulations to Kjerstin and Adam on their beautiful wedding, by the way. Love you guys.

The Neighborhood

I live in Jamaica Plain, Boston. That could mean one of a million things. That could mean that I live in a mansion on a hill surrounded by trees or next to a pond. That could mean that I live in a Dominican/Cuban semi-ghetto. That could mean that I live in a hippy crunchy organic vegan co-op. Walking around here is a study in neighborhoods within neighborhoods, and just how small the boundaries between one and the next can be.
Today, I walked over to Franklin Park, which is about half a kilometer away from here. I leave my house, which is in a predominantly Spanish-speaking, not-too-wealthy little sub-section. Cross over Washington Street onto a street called Peter Parley, and the houses get big and ornate, full of white folks. Across a street and you're in a different world. The streets are narrow and windy, and there are more trees. Everything is more closed in. Then I get to Franklin Park, which is sketchily maintained at best. But it's gigantic. So gigantic, in fact, that I almost missed the fact that there's a giant fairground set up in it, minutes from my house. A big big fairground. With Ferris wheels and booths and a stage and everything. The rest of the park is largely wooded, with these boulders and piles of stones everywhere. It's kind of fascinating. But then you turn around and it's the same thing in reverse.
I live in a house of music. The landlords are in a band called Lovewhip (which has a website you can google in your spare time). They have a recording studio in the basement. My roommate goes to the NEC, but I think I'm treading on familiar ground here. I think I just wrote about this. I'll skip it for now.
More neighborhood. There's a subway stop minutes from my house, and another just a few more minutes in the other direction. Downtown Jamaica Plain is about fifteen minutes' walk from here. I get wireless internet. I found a desk on the front sidewalk. Life is good.

Apartment Update

I walked home this evening, and found that the upstairs neighbor is moving out, and left his desk that is perfect for my apartment out on the sidewalk right in front of the house. So now I've got a perfect desk, and all I had to do was walk it in from the sidewalk. That's totally bitchin', if I do say so myself. I'm going to try to get my camera working and possibly take some pictures right now!

Boston, Baby!

I moved in to my apartment in Boston on Sunday. Yes! It's really great. It's within walking distance of two metro stops; depending on whether I want to go downtown or not, I can choose one or the other. Sweet. It's a three-story house, I'm on the first floor with Tim from Macalester, who plays trombone and upright bass and goes to the NEC (New England Conservatory). The second story is more musicians, who are moving out soon I understand, and the third floor is the landlord, who's also a musician in a band called Lovewhip. It's funny music. They have a recording studio in the basement. This is great.
I still haven't really moved in. I have nothing but a suitcase full of clothes, some books, and a guitar amp. It's daunting. I suppose I'll get my digital camera up and running and then post some pictures on my web page.
Oh yeah! I changed the web page, also. If you want to download the latest album, go to latiflearned.com. If you want to go to my exceedingly outdated pictures site, go to Opus 1. If you want to see a page I made for a friend, that includes a lot of pictures of me, head over to alexmarvar.com.

latiflearned.com

My web page is now at a (more or less) permanent site. Head over to latiflearned.com to see my (more or less out of date) web page that's not a blog. Sweet. I swear that there will be more development on this in the coming months. Eventually, it'll have my music and not be at all about me, personally. but more about my invented personality Latif Learned who plays guitar and sings.
I'm moving to Boston in a few days. Maybe just maybe I'll take pictures and then put them up on my latiflearned.com. Word.

I Showed Up Again on the Web

Explo put me on the website again. Also, I'm told that if you Google image Search me that I actually show up, thanks to CosmoGIRL! Thanks CosmoGIRL!, for making my web presence that much stronger. The front page of an image search! Sweet.
In other news, New Haven is hot as hell. Today is the first time in three weeks that it's been below 90 and not like a billion percent humidity. Darn! I like the heat. Although it limits your wardrobe options. Survival first, looks second. Ummmm... That's all.

Def Leppard

The one-armed drummer from Def Leppard is going to be wearing a t-shirt designed by my brother Ryan in the next issue of Spin Magazine. It was originally going to be somebody in Death Cab for Cutie, but now it's Def Leppard. But if you're cockney, the first word of each band is pronounced the same way. I never thought in a million years that I would be in any way, even the most periphally, connected to the one-armed drummer from Def Leppard. This is like a vicarious dream come true for me. Amazing!
Go see Ryan's T-Shirt Designs. Check back at this site in a couple of weeks. It'll be more complete then. You might even be able to buy a t-shirt on it then.

Go check this out.
What a crazy fun summer!

Summer

It's summer. I'm in New Haven again. The problem with sporadically blogging is getting back into the swing of it. What do you say? Does anybody even read this anymore? Probably not. No problem.
I'm at Exploration Summer Programs again this summer, working as the computer guy again. This is good. So good, in fact, that I'm going to be working for them full-time starting in September. Right now I'm just one of the summer employees. So that means move to Boston (Jamaica Plain, of course), have a salary and health insurance once again, pay off some of that impending college debt, put money toward retirement. The plan is to move in to a house full of musicians in a neighborhood full of musicians with musicians and record more albums and generally be a better musician in my non-computer-guy time. Then I want to bike across the country. Interested? In two or three years? Give me a call. Or email.
I got a new laptop. This is a real boon for me, because it's the first time since early in the France experience that I've been able to keep all my thoughts/music/data in one place, which means that things like blogging and recording music and taking photos and what-have-you are much easier. Its keyboard lights up in the dark. It makes me happy.
So yes, Boston. Music. Computers. What you would have guessed if you were guessing, basically.

Update

I've added translation features to the blog. This is basically the funniest thing ever. Check the sidebar.

Minnesota, Chicago, Whatever

I'm in Minnesota now. You know, hanging out with Anna, seeing all of my newly dumbfounded recent-grad friends, in addition to the old-school graduates who've been dumbfounded for a year or two now. I'm gradually re-accumulating my stuff, so that I can put it all in one place for once in my life. I found my classical guitar and all of my cool music books here in a closet. Sweet. Minnesota is nice, in the way it's always been. The trick is not to be fooled when you visit during the warm months into thinking that the climate is livable. Because it's not. It's the arctic circle.
There's a radio station here in the Twin Cities that is rockin'. It's an NPR station, but it plays cool and new, generally hip (if not often rockin' to the max) music. Go check it out, because you're wasting time anyway, and you know it. Among the recent few bands they've played (off the web site): Spoon, Sly and the Family Stone, and Thievery Corporation. That's not bad for a radio station. Plus they do a webcast. Go listen. I'm going to submit my stuff once I've got it in totally awesome CD format for them to sufficiently digest.
By the way, stop and ask yourself, "Self, am I sufficiently pimping Donald's CD to my family and friends?" If the answer is no, your horoscope will start telling you bad things. It's written in the stars, bitches.