December 22, 2010

  • Interlude: Rant about Everything

    And to think that I worried about getting my bottle of choir wine through U.S. customs.

    Perhaps I ought to have worried about the Communist CD instead.

    Today was decidedly interesting. My sister had a violin lesson. I'd forgotten how much I hated those. The whole day spent practicing, spent practicing the vibrato in agonizing slow motion. EEEurrrEEUReeurghEEEurrr. . . dreadful. And it wasn't even her fault. There's no way in the world to make really really slow vibrato sound decent. So I escaped the house and took a long, long walk.

    It was warm and sunny. I could've worn shorts and not been cold. A very few days ago, I was so cold I couldn't feel my face, and a pink-and-purple demon bike had tried to dump me into an ice-covered, traffic-ridden street in the middle of the night. That was also an interesting night, half a world away. It was all very surreal. Did the last four months really happen? My memories are terrible at evoking lengths of time. It might have been yesterday or a year ago, it might have lasted a week or a semester. Afterwards, when I think back on it, it all feels the same.

    I was so excited to go to Budapest. The adventure of it all, plopping into an unfamiliar part of the world with no one to rely on, with not even the language to guide me home. Landing there, that first day, how confusing it all was, and how everything went wrong. Then, five weeks in, debating with Chuck Norris and Emmy whether we were half done or a third done. . . then finals. . . how could it be past?

    When I was a fifth grader, there was this huge end-of-the-year field trip that we were all so excited about. All throughout that year, I told myself over and over again that someday, that field trip would be in the past, and I would look back to the "present" and say to myself, I knew it. Meaning that at some point, this thing that I was looking forward to would move from the future into the past, and I was aware of it. That was really a long time ago.

    Yesterday during dinner, I'd put in the CD that I'd brought back, the Borond Odon. It's an adorable collection of Hungarian children's songs, sung in a pinchy voice, something about this Borond Odon who apparently sat on a black stone, and something about a helicopter. I fed it into Google translate and found myself more confused than before. Then today, in went the other CD. Earlier in the day, I'd played it for my sister without showing her what it was, and asked what it sounded like to her. She said it sounded like patriotism and nationalism. It was very close. It's called Best of Communism, and it's full of these march-sounding Communist songs. I wondered if it would sound familiar to my father.

    My father has always taken an interest in anything and everything. Nights around the dinner table when I was younger, or sitting in the car, we would happen upon a topic, and he would promptly embark on a long rant about it. A lecture, of sorts. More often than not, it would be about math. The first time I saw the quadratic equation, it was in a comic strip. I was in sixth grade. My father felt the profound need to derive it for me, even though I was still learning how to solve linear equations in one variable. Later on, as I became more involved with mathematics, he'd choose more diverse topics, usually something from some competition, all beyond my ability at the time. I was always confused, and frustrated, but mostly confused. I could follow each step, but not why the proof worked as a whole, only that each step worked. I did not see the overarching structure; I was lost in the details, and I came to the conclusion that my father had lost touch with how to teach anyone younger than a college student.

    It's not until now, now that I am a college student, do I remember the great many other things he said, that have become so completely absorbed I take them for granted. Now, I realize that in his life, he's seen a great many common errors and pitfalls of thought, and he made absolutely certain that no progeny of his ever spouts any of that illogic. Around four years old was when I began to form memories; at the time of my earliest memories, I remember my father making it absolutely clear to me that people are free to believe what they wish, but I was not to bother my neighbor with my beliefs, nor they us with theirs, and that a person's freedom of belief stops right where thy neighbors' begins. He'd reason out things until they made sense to him. Always logical to the point of impracticality, everything had to be logical to him before he'd be content, and whatever it took to make sense to him, that was how he explained it. It helped a great deal. The first day I brought home that opaque "entropy is a measure of disorder" and "entropy is always increasing" stuff, he sat me down and cleared it right up. No one's going to understand if one says entropy is always increasing, and I certainly didn't. On that day in middle school, I hadn't the foggiest idea what it meant, how it applied to anything. It sounded like intelligent-sounding physics-speak for physics professors to me. He told me that I couldn't make a car that keeps running forever without more fuel, no matter how efficient, and that eventually I'd have to put in more fuel. I thought about it a bit. It made sense. Since then, this most often (mis)quoted second law of thermodynamics has come up a great many times in school, in talks, in debates with people. It is always clear to me how the law works. It is always painfully obvious to me when someone begins with their "you can't get more complicated life forms because of the second law talk," that they have no idea what the law actually means, and that they are just quoting it from a textbook and misunderstanding it. Only now do I realize how grateful I actually am to have it clear in my mind.

    But now I've made my father sound like a patriarch who runs around spouting math and lectures all the time. Close to true, but not entirely true. Oftentimes he would tell stories, but they'd always be the story of how this man caught a rabbit on day 0 and made rabbit stew or something. And then, on the nth day, he'd make stew with the leftover stew from day n-1. Meanwhile, on the nth day, every person who'd eaten stew on day n-1 would return to eat stew, except the most recent person would bring a friend with him. Eventually, the stew had something like r^n density of rabbit in it (0<r<1), and the man had n guests eating stew with him. By this point, the stew was pretty near indistinguishable from water, and that was the end of it. I did not understand. For many years, I did not understand. To this day, I'm not quite sure I understand.

    Other times, they'd be renditions of historical events. It was a habit I picked up as well, for I'd waltz home from my history class and narrate the day's lesson to my sister. But the version my father told was always a bit different from the version I heard in school. They were very interesting stories. Every rendition of China under Mao that I'd ever heard had him portrayed as the essence of evil dictator. My father's version instead had a flawed human evil dictator, still evil, still responsible for a great deal of suffering, but also a sad man whose son and best friend died in a war, whose wife was taken captive and murdered by the rebel government in Taiwan, who wrote poetry, who put a swift and decisive end to the practice of foot-binding. Those are details that never come through in any class I've ever taken, and not that I automatically accept Mao as depicted by my father, but it is definitely interesting to hear about it. And his rendering of the Korean War was pretty unique as well.

    So I was wondering if my father would recognize any of the Communist songs. Stupid of me. He recognized the first one right away, and knew it well. The International. Apparently, it was common to every communist country. He had grown up hearing it and singing it, and so had my mother, and so had my grandparents, and so had every single person in China who was not very young. He recited the lyrics in Chinese and translated them, and carefully explained to my sister and me the difference between Communism and Socialism in eight monosyllabic Chinese characters each. It was quite remarkable.

    I once met a serious Communist in real life. He was standing on the corner of Old Campus last year, this elderly Asian guy with a very straight back and an armful of Communist pamphlets. Speaking in English and recruiting. He was very polite. He was much more polite than that proselytizing creep by Commons. He didn't threaten me with hellfire and brimstone; didn't insult me before turning his back on me and yell at all the passerby in a jeering tone, SHE'S AN ATHEIST!!11!!one!! as though I were some circus freak to be ridiculed, as though it were ok to ridicule people as freaks. He didn't then proceed to automatically dismiss anything and everything I said. No, he was perfectly civil and asked me very politely to read the pamphlet.

    I am not terribly fond of people who tell me I'm going to hell. They are not particularly pleasant.

    In any case, to each their constitutional rights. But look at this chart, the one that says What the Public Knows about Religion (http://pewforum.org/other-beliefs-and-practices/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey.aspx), where it says that 68% of people surveyed know that "Constitution says government shall neither establish nor interfere with religion."

    If we extrapolate to the whole population, we estimate that nearly a third of Americans don't know the fundamental principles of religious freedom. Isn't that the most terrifying thing ever?