we just relate as people

you know what is funny in the dance world?
age seems to melt away (mostly).
and most of us are in a similar range but.
i just don't even think about it
like suddenly i passed this line
left college
and people aren't confined to ages by their year in college
people are just people
like, i have adult friends now and we just relate as people.

(--chat conversation with David)

Sometimes I express things best when I'm not trying to write about them.

New best song ever

7-ish clicks through suggested videos, starting from a Zero 7 song a friend posted on Twitter, I found this.



The video makes me happy too.

What I wonder about really good social dancers

During my recent obsession with blues dancing, I've had the incredible good fortune of experiencing several truly breathtaking dances with a few different leads.  These dances stand out in my mind and stay in my memory because of the amazing connection with the lead and the music, and the emotional intensity thereof.  These are truly special to me and I want to hold onto them (while of course hoping for more).

But... I've been wondering.  Are these leads just that good, that every dance feels like that for them?  (If that's the case, and it was me, I'd be living on a cloud...)  I like to think that every single dance is different.  It's a different combination of two partners, a song, and a moment in time.  When all of those come together right, you have something beautiful.

So, much as I'm sure these particular leads are leaving follows breathless in droves, I just hope that they might feel some of what I feel and appreciate so deeply when I dance with them.

"In Defense and Explanation of Twitter"

I wrote the following for a new-grad program application, and thought I would post these thoughts...


Oh, Twitter. It is definitely one of the tech buzzwords of today. Visit a few blogs and company sites and you are bound to run across various designs of “follow me on Twitter!” buttons. Though I have zero formal training in marketing, it would make sense that many view Twitter as one of the latest-and-greatest web application bandwagons through which to expand one's audience. On the other hand, well-known personalities, especially celebrities, are likely to collect thousands upon thousands of followers—and could easily utilize the service to communicate with them directly and personally. (Such, I might add, is very exciting from the fan's end. I know this from personal experience!) Many also tout Twitter as a source for disseminating and reading breaking news before it can be posted or shared via other avenues.

To me, the experience of Twitter is a bit different. I began with what I would suppose is a typical non-Twitter-user's view: the question, “what is the point of it?”, followed by dismissively waving it off. I specifically remember once observing on a friend's laptop screen that he and several others were writing messages on Twitter back and forth to each other. My thought at the time was that I could not believe they were involved in such a silly waste of time. Somehow, though, my Digital-Media-Design-major's curiosity got the best of me. I found myself walking around with thoughts of approximately one hundred forty characters in length popping into my mind. After a couple of days this started driving me a little crazy, so I logged on and (with some disappointment) settled on the username I really wanted but preceded by an underscore. Oh well.

In the beginning of my Twitter days, of course, I did not really know what I was doing. I eagerly searched for and followed people I knew in “real life” and hoped that they followed me back. I fell prey to tweeting (with some repetitiveness) about what I was doing at the moment, if I was particularly loving it. As I think we tend to do—particularly these days via social networking applications—I put my thoughts out there in the hopes that others would find my online persona of at least mild interest or amusement and be thus inspired to follow me.

Along the timeline of my first few months getting really into Twitter, I began to change my approach. I sought out users who posted links to content I found relevant to my potential career path. I began to actually take up others on their Follow Friday recommendations instead of skipping over tweets filled with usernames. I followed people who were just plain fun, quirky, or made me smile. Perhaps most importantly, though, I realized that Twitter is most enjoyable after you transition from passively taking in others' information and thoughts as they stream in front of your eyes (and occasionally outputting your own) to interacting with others. It is probably easy to forget that behind the tweets is a real person typing them from their laptop or mobile phone. I discovered that if I started replying to what others were saying, many were often inclined to reply back and converse. For a long time I had been skeptical about talking with strangers in an online venue, but at least in the context of Twitter, my opinion has changed. Thanks to Twitter, I am able to connect with friendly people from anywhere in the world whom I doubt I would ever meet otherwise.

Let me end with probably my most personally exciting Twitter story. Thanks to a particular Twitter user whose posts and conversation I greatly enjoy, I connected with another Twitter user. She and I exchanged several messages and discovered common interests. I learned that she helps teach a course at Penn, occasionally flying to Philadelphia to be on campus. One of the times she was here, we happened to have a mutual free moment and met up. I found her thoroughly enjoyable and positive. If not for Twitter, we most likely would never have met. In the future, hopefully, we will be able to go rock climbing together!

A final note: yes, I agree, there is a lot of noise on Twitter. I see this whenever I search the trending topics. Therefore, the key is to find and follow the people who post valuable content, who are friendly and interesting and willing to interact. Is this not what we wish to do in “real life”, as well?

All the guys in my mind/life

My mind keeps going back to this. There are too many situations to think about. And as I try to manage the thoughts, I find myself sorting these guys into groups.

There are some with whom I am good friends. I am comfortable with them and our interactions are fun and easygoing. And from my point of view, we are particularly close if we share our guy/girl stories with each other, which is an exchange I find enjoyable and interesting. I value these friendships a lot.

There are some who I only know a little, but who are so so friendly to me, such truly nice human beings, that the usually short interactions I happen to have with them here and there in my life just brighten up my days so much. They make me happy, just being with them for a bit - I want to say, "I just LOVE him!" I feel so glad to have come across them in my life, even if I never end up having more of a friendship with them (though I'm sure I'd like to).

There are some who I know, and who know me, and maybe we talk sometimes but not too often, and I'm at least somewhat comfortable around them. I want to talk with them and get to know them more, but I'm a little too shy, or I'm not sure they have enough reciprocal interest, or I sense that maybe I wouldn't quite fit into their lives. I guess I might also include here a few with whom I've lost a previous connection which I think I would like to rebuild. There are occasional little steps forward, but usually they are just little steps that probably fade anyway in the big picture. (And I mean all of this in a friendship sense, mainly.)

And then there are a few who I have a sense might have some level of interest in me. Maybe I should think a little more about what I'm doing in the various situations I'm in with these guys, because usually I play it by ear and try to be my friendly (I hope) self. I have genuinely had fun times with them though. But to be most fair to them, I should work out what I think I feel, and make sure to act accordingly and honestly. The problem is how ridiculously indecisive I usually am.

On the flip side, there's the crush(es?)...I can only think of one right now whom I've labeled in my mind as a crush. I've been thinking a little about crushes, and realized I don't really know what to do about them. Usually it's a "like from afar" situation; you don't really talk to them much, just kind of glance over at them when you happen to be in the same room for awhile and try to not be awkward when you do happen to interact. If they contact you, or pay you a few moments' attention, you react similarly to "i am filled with ridiculous giddy excitement. hahahha" (quoting myself to a friend). The thing is, it's all kind of meaningless. This attraction has to be mostly superficial, because you don't know the person well enough for it to be more deeply based, anyway. Maybe you can get to know them more, but then it's almost like picking someone randomly, because a crush-level attraction is no guarantee for an attraction on the personality level (which is extremely important, I believe). Once I got this far in my thinking, I felt kind of sad that it's probably pointless to hold onto this crush (or any, basically)...yet, I don't want to give up, because those silly moments of excitement do come along with it all, and I have something to hold onto, no matter how much it might not really matter. If it could turn out to matter, I would probably be ridiculously happy.

Finally, the category which no guy is filling for me right now - one who I really like, with whom I feel comfortable and compatible; we laugh easily and I want to talk with and spend time around him, and I want something more intense than friendship with him. Such is most elusive though, it seems.

I just realized, or realized again

Penn is crazy, and the scope of my life is ridiculously limited. At dance lessons last semester I met a guy from Egypt. I actually had no idea he was from there until a conversation something like this:

Friend: "My friend and I are going to [some salsa event], would you like to come?"
Me: "Oh...is that over fall break?"
Friend: "Yeah it is."
Me: "Aww man, I'd love to but I'm going home for break."
Friend: "Where's home for you?"
Me: "Oh just New Jersey, it's really close. Where are you from?"
Friend: "Egypt."
Me: "Ohh....!"

He's a really nice guy. I met up with him and a friend of his for dinner at Greek Lady one time. If I remember correctly, his friend is Arab, but American-born. Throughout dinner they discussed things like the politics and the world's view of the Middle East. I hardly said anything because I had no knowledge of the subjects. Later, walking back with just my friend, he said, "Wow that must have been the most boring dinner ever for you!" I told him no, definitely not, it was really interesting to listen to their thoughts.

Penn students come from ALL over the place. One of my roommates is from outside Las Vegas and the other is from Hong Kong and has lived in Canada and Australia. Among the three of us we run across differences as well as similarities in our growing up experiences. But honestly, wow. I am impressed by students who come from other countries, especially ones more different from the US than others, to spend their entire undergraduate college education here. Already, though, I'm assuming levels of difference. Honestly I have no idea what it's like to grow up in Egypt or India or Europe or wherever else I'm thinking of as "much different". There are probably more experiences in common with my own than I might guess. This is the "modern world" after all. Still, to think that I come in contact with these people, that they now lead lives very much like mine (we're on the same campus), kind of blows my mind. Yet I rarely stop to contemplate these ocean-spanning links - except for moments like right now, or when I see that one of their Facebook networks is a country on another continent. I should feel privileged to have such a worldly collection of people practically at my doorstep for four years, and try to connect with more of them.

Exchange students are a similar boat of people, but could be even more impressive... I met a French exchange student at dance - totally adorable, enthusiastic about salsa and jazz, friendly as anything. He's definitely got a French accent, and usually I have to speak a little more carefully for him and sometimes explain what something is (try football...). Yet here he is, studying engineering at Penn for goodness' sake. And on the flip side, a friend of mine in DMD just spent a semester studying in New Zealand and sometimes I can hardly get my mind around that, and I'm not even the one who went! I just can't imagine living a piece of life in what seems, to me, like a different world.

It's all just awesome. I think if I were to go to places around the world, what I might find most interesting would be not the history, the food, the monuments or whatever...but the people, and their lives.

Stepmania + perception/attention is crazy

As is somewhat obvious from the previous post, I play Stepmania. To keep the history short for now, I've played for awhile, and I'd say I'm pretty good at it. I've often noticed a quite interesting phenomenon involving the interaction of two factors - perception and my level of attention - and the resulting score/grade on whatever song I'm playing at the moment. In the case that someday someone reads this and doesn't know what Stepmania is: it's DDR, played with fingers on the keyboard - which means, a stream of arrows (each one is up, down, right or left) moves towards the top of the window, coordinated with a song, and as they hit the outline of arrows, you must press a key on the keyboard. You don't need to use the arrow keys though; I started with that, but typically you'll move to using more comfortable keys: I use e, f, j, i in correspondence with the order of the arrows in the line at the top.

Now, as one gets better at this game, the intuitive thought is that the harder you concentrate, the more you focus your attention on hitting the keys at exactly the right time, the more accurate your key hits will be, and the better your score for the song. Well, I started noticing that this wasn't happening. Actually, if I relaxed just a little, and didn't try quite so hard to read the arrows, but rather let the stream fly by as if I might be just about to let my eyes glaze over, I found that I did better. I could hit a stream of keys more accurately and score better overall. (Quick disclaimer...this discovery did not cause a sudden major improvement in my skills. I don't always get the attention level just right to make it work; it's a little more random.) And someone pointed out the key to me one time: muscle memory. This makes sense and sounds rather obvious, but it's still intensely interesting to me. It might also mean that I play the same songs a very large number of times. hahaha.

The strongest and most interesting example of this occurred over winter break. My younger brother came by while I was playing what I think is a pretty crazy song and stepfile:



(Note that this video makes it look a little harder than it does when I play it. I set it to space out the arrows more, and they move faster to compensate for that.)

So there I was, telling my brother to hang around and listen to this crazy song. And he thinks it's not even a song; he's going on with this analogy, narrating the song as sounds of a computer breaking down... I'm laughing at all of this cuz I love him and it's pretty funny the way he's saying it, so definitely I'm not really able to give full attention to the game. It's even possible my eyes were starting to tear because that happens really easily for me when I laugh, which would mean I couldn't even see the screen totally clearly. Somehow, with these combined reductions in rapt attention, I ended up getting some kind of personal record score (like my second best, or something) on the song. Insane! It means I'm perceiving the arrows, this information is flying through my brain, all the visual system, the recognition stuff, and then my brain's processing which arrow is which and commanding the corresponding finger to hit the key - ALL happening before I can realize the arrow-finger-key combination. Becoming cognizant of what my body is doing is slower than my body doing it. (Actually hmm when I word it like that, it seems to make sense...) It's just that usually, we think of the process as: first we decide we want to make an action, then we do it. Here, the action is done before I know what it is!! Woahhhhh. This is really awesome. And it's my psych class on perception in real life. :D