What If This Is Permanent?

No, seriously, what if?

I wrote my first functional Pd patch yesterday. It is a triple ring modulator (Sterling: "Wait, your first thing in Pd wasn't a delay?"); nobody who knows what a ring modulator does will be impressed by this feat, but it's a start. Basically, there are three sine wave generators oscillating at the fundamental, first, and second order overtones of a single frequency, and the input signal is modulated with each of these waves in parallel before going to the output. As expected, it ground my guitar signal into a heap of vaguely resonant noise, but I actually really liked the sound the test signal (also a sine wave) made when modulated, especially when I was changing the frequencies of the carrier waves. So maybe I'll control the carrier wave frequencies with a simple LFO. And then try to control the test signal with my keyboard and an adsr~ object. Perhaps this is how most madness begins...

Talked to my mother on the phone yesterday. She said she probably wouldn't be able to make it to my commencement ceremony in May, because my brother will be taking his high school entrance exams a couple days after (more or less the time it takes to fly from here to Taiwan, accounting for time zones), and she feels she has to stick around to help him prepare. She didn't show up to my high school graduation either, but a couple of family friends she knew since before I was born came from Wisconsin in her stead, also visiting their son along the way. But she said yesterday she didn't know if they would be willing to show up this time.

I was upset. I lay in bed and talked with a pillow covering half of my face. This surprised both my mother and myself; after all, it's only practical, and my family is nothing if not practical, and I hardly gave a fuss about high school graduation. The prospect of walking alone, going to the reception alone when every last one of my classmates will be surrounded by their families, and then spending the rest of the evening (and most likely the next day or two) alone while everyone went to big celebrations and other such events with their families, was somehow a little too much to accept. Also, I don't naively think "my friends are my family" anymore, as I did in high school, and even if I did, it would be impossible to continue thinking that while they were with their families and I was with no one. Finally, this isn't like high school, where I wandered around for three years and wound up with a diploma. I worked hard in college: I stayed up doing homework until 6AM, sleeping three hours and waking up again to go to 10AM lecture; I spent entire summers in the laboratory; I had to rebuild my self-confidence and motivation to keep doing science after they were all but obliterated sophomore year. Graduating will be a monument to something that actually had been at stake.

My mother said she thought I was the type of person who liked being left alone with his work and preoccupations; and the funny thing is, a lot of the time, I am, but not all the time. In hindsight, it seems less like I didn't care for any of the rituals that come with "normal" family life as I simply went without them. I spend too much money flying back and forth between America and Taiwan and am always tired and dazed when I go home, so we don't go on vacations when I'm home, not to mention I haven't been home for over two weeks at a time since freshman year, due to research and a general disinclination to be in Taiwan. I don't spend a lot of time on the phone with my family because the 12-hour time difference means my mother's always calling me as I'm going out on Friday and Saturday nights, and my brother can't ever seem to find anything to say. I don't have extended family gatherings because I don't have an extended family: on my mother's side I have my grandparents, my uncle, and my grandparents' relatives from previous marriages whom they left behind on the mainland during the war in 1949, and whom I have never met, and we're all but detached from almost all our relatives on my father's side (which is a whole other story). In general, our family meetings with relatives tend to come off as courtesy or obligation rather than bonding through communal experience.

I guess that's why I enjoy the school year so much: I feel like the other students and I are all on the same plane, trying to figure it out for ourselves in a strange city, in a strange world. But commencement will be the one day in four years that I can't hold onto that illusion, or even sit out a week or two until it returns, like I did over winter break.

My mother said she thought I was the type of person who liked being left alone with his work and preoccupations; and the funny thing is, a lot of the time, I am, but not all the time. I said maybe she could fund some sort of dinner party I would arrange and formally invite people to, so that they would be going to a gathering for their own personal interests, instead of to celebrate my college graduation; she thought that was possible, but then I thought more and was upset that I should have to bait people into caring about my graduation. I asked whether I should have been worse at being on my own so she would've paid more attention, which was a genuinely stupid thing to say, the kind of asinine non-question that only very upset 15-year-olds ask, which I suppose I was, except for the part where I was 21. Besides, that's not really what I want, to be fussed over; sometimes I truly do need to be alone, and sometimes I truly cannot tolerate it.

Finally, my mother said she honestly had not anticipated this reaction from me, and that she would try to get my (notoriously flaky) uncle or someone else close to the family to come. Now I feel guilty for being a lousy child. (Which, oddly enough, is a sentiment I remember feeling back when I was actually a child--for a practical atheist, I sure undergo a lot of Puritanical self-flagellation.) I didn't want to go home for winter break, and she didn't force me; now I want someone to come to my commencement, and she's going to try and find someone. If that doesn't frame me as an utter jerk, I don't know what could.

It's my brother's 15th birthday on Thursday; I should call, and also tell my mother I'm sorry, that it's OK if nobody comes to commencement, that I understand ritual significance must yield to practicality. Good Lord--Ben is 15. That's how old I was when I left home for Jersey. If my experiences are any indication, the roller-coaster is just beginning.