Initialize

Hello.

So the first post is always rather difficult. Especially when I've been away from the game for so long. I used to be more diligent of a diarist--I prefer "journal" to "diary," but "journalist" implies something I'm not, and will probably never be--but I'll be damned if it's not much harder when you're not part of a circle of individuals, all documenting the same mutual events from a mind-boggling array of perspectives, commenting on each other's accounts, trying to extract some sort of truth from the muck of experience and emotion that would be at once collective and intimate.

"...at once collective and intimate..." I'm sure there's something Herbert Marcuse, or someone else from the Frankfurt School of philosophy, which I have been studying for the past three months or so, would have had to say about that. Just go read Eros and Civilization.

Anyway, now that high school's been over with for two and a half years, I doubt any resurgence of that singular situation is going to occur. Whoever wants to figure out what it was all like can find it in the depths of www.opendiary.com. Actually, a couple months after my freshman year at college began, the entire site suffered two catastrophic system attacks that erased everything I ever wrote from before fall of 2005. Sam North's--now Atticus Lowry's--account, as well as those of Robin Banks, Bartender and others, can still be found there, but the only two places Robot Astronaut's--my--particular version still exist are
1. on my external hard drive
2. on A4 printer paper, in a ring binder held together by duct tape, in a time capsule buried somewhere in the bowels of The Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, central Jersey, 15 minutes' drive outside of Princeton, to remain sealed until 2029.

Not to say that what I wrote during the past two and a half years is completely worthless. Some of it from the end of 2004 to the middle/end of 2005 was actually quite good. It can be found at www.livejournal.com/zerokanada or thesecretweapon.blogspot.com. The former has been dead for a year now, after a resentful and declarative final post; the latter never quite died, but rather degenerated into a series of drunken, deranged fragments posted at irregular intervals. My hope is that whatever this blog turns out to be will be more coherent and organized, and serve the purposes of documentary and reflection, instead of (just) the ones of catharsis and self-indulgence.

Why did that disintegration take place? Mostly because I couldn't say what I wanted anymore, due to certain people closely following my entries. Eventually I couldn't talk about the most important things in anything but the most abstract of terms, and at some point I stopped writing meaningful entries altogether. However, I think--hope--that the relationships in my life which caused that sort of hang-up have progressed to a point where that will no longer be an issue. The plan is to make this journal a little more public than the last, which will hopefully force a little bit of coherence into my writing.

So. A little bit about me. As of the date of this writing, I am 20 years, 4 months, and 19 days old. I was born in one city, but grew up in four: born in Taipei, but also lived in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, in the Twin Cities suburbs, and Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where I went to boarding school, and Baltimore, Maryland, where I go to college.

I go to the Johns Hopkins University, mostly because I was rejected from Columbia University, a fact which I think has influenced my life for the better. I am majoring in Biophysics (which is not offered at Columbia at the undergraduate level), and am in my junior year. I think, in all seriousness, that my department is one of the best things that ever happened to me. I do research in the lab of a professor in Materials Science; we work with membrane proteins. I'd be working on a project of my own, but as of right now I am still trying to get clearance to use the x-ray crystallography facility in my department. Something about letting undergraduates fire potentially lethal electromagnetic radiation makes people nervous, I suppose.

I am also minoring in Writing Seminars, which continues a long and dubious literary history dating back to junior year of high school. I've decided to partially specialize in poetry, because I like the ability to mess with form a little, and because there are too many fiction writers already, and to irritate all the poetry-haters. (They exist.) My favorite writers are Mark Z. Danielewski, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Haruki Murakami.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about politics and philosophy. I talk about those topics with everyone who is willing, and quite a few people who aren't. I find myself to the distant left of anything that would be seriously considered in the United States. I believe capitalism has progressed to a point where it must be curbed. I'm quite influenced by Marxist theory, though I don't consider myself a straight-up Marxist (or straight-up anything else, as a matter of fact); I spent last semester studying the philosophy of the Frankfurt School, as I mentioned, and though I don't completely buy into psychoanalysis, I believe they raised many valid, important, and still relevant points. I like existentialism. I believe the human condition can be well explained in terms of "pursuit of irrational ends by rational means." I can't say whether God exists, but I practice atheism. I believe in an afterlife, mostly because I consider the alternative a bogus letdown, but don't believe that it actually solves anything.

I spend a lot of time as well thinking about music. I try to listen to everything and find something I like in every genre. I do lean heavily towards rock ("indie" rock, if you want to call it that) and electronic. Recently I have dabbled in ambient, IDM, drum 'n' bass, and dub reggae, among other things. Don't ask me how many albums I have, and really don't ask me how many of them I paid for.

I play music. I started playing guitar at age 14 (sometimes I complain to my mother about not letting me learn electric guitar at age 6 like I'd wanted, because I'd be so much better now).
I picked up electric bass a year and a half ago, and have been spending most of my time with that instrument since. My favorite guitarist is Jonny Greenwood; my favorite bassist is Squarepusher. Sometimes I can't decide which instrument I like more. I'm alright at both of them; my standards are that you're not good enough on an instrument until you can play any note with any tonality on cue.

I play bass in a band (guitar on a couple of songs); we're called Trafalgar, we play indie rock (I guess), we like delay and feedback, we've self-recorded an EP, we've gigged a few times, and we're always on the verge of breaking up for various reasons. It happens. I don't like to talk about my band unless people ask, because I feel that it makes me sound like an asshole. I'm fairly tired of playing rock; I'd rather be doing something more electronic (I got Ableton Live--don't ask how--but have yet to figure it out) and experimental. I've tried, and am still trying, to start other projects, but so far none have panned out very well. I wish I had more (any) classical training. I'm trying to get better at slap. I wish I had a fretless and knew how to play it.

I'm somewhat obsessed with memory, and the idea that everything that happens should be remembered and have consequence. I'm also obsessed that everything I do in my life should have some meaning, one way or the other; I loathe devoting time to things that seems meaningless. I've got a pretty definitive, well, definition for love, and suspect that most people (including myself, half of the time) don't have what it takes to meet it.

That's enough background. I don't know who's going to sign on for this ride--chances of Andrew and those folk coming back seem low--but maybe, through tracking out life with words, I'll be able to squeeze some meaning and significance out of it in the long run.

It's the 21st of December, 2006. Very much near the end of this year. Every year I take a little end-of-year survey for myself, that should be posted within the week, or so. This past semester has been an uphill battle and an upwards journey, both, for the most part; we'll see if we can continue that. There's no real plot to this story; I don't know who the characters are; the setting changes as often as my mind changes. But maybe there will be some sense--in Theodor Adorno's words, some internal harmony--to all of this.

Right, then.