per·func·to·ry

per·func·to·ry

[per-fuhngk-tuh-ree] 

adjective

1. performed merely as a routine duty; hasty and superficial: perfunctory courtesy.
2. lacking interest, care, or enthusiasm; indifferent or apathetic: In his lectures he reveals himself to be merely a perfunctory speaker.

I hope that everything I do in life will be so much more than simply perfunctory. 

one of my new favourite poems

l(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

iness 

 - e. e. cummings

Wordsworth's Daffodils

My close friend H came back from her vacation from the March Break with two lovely souvenirs for me and our friend M. They are adorable miniature turtle carvings. Being English geeks to a ridiculous degree and having just come from an English class on poetry through the ages, M and I decided that we would name our turtles after two great poets: Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) and William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Thus, Edgar and Wordsworth are now quite happily sitting in our rooms.

In honour of our new friends, I thought I'd post a poem by Wordsworth. Often considered Wordsworth's most famous poem, "I wandered lonely as a cloud" (also known as "Daffodils" or "The Daffodils") was first written in 1804.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: -
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -and gazed -but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.

Interestingly enough, Wordsworth's sister, wrote about walking with her brother among the daffodils just a few years prior to Wordsworth's poem. Here are her words below.

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.

I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.

This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again. The Bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the sea.

— Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal , Thursday, 15 April 1802

a person who thinks all the time

a person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about
except thoughts
so,
he loses touch with reality
and lives in a world of illusions.

-Alan Watts (1915-1973)

If you don't have something to live for, how will you have someone to play for?

Traveling by transit

Living in the suburbs of Toronto, it's usually much less efficient to transit than it is to hitch a ride from a friend or family member, so I rarely find myself in a bus, streetcar, or subway. Still, whenever I end up transiting, I find that the extra few hours it takes me to travel is well worth it; somehow, I always feel much better after riding the rocket.

I wonder whether this positive feeling is the result of knowing that by choosing to transit (instead of asking a parent or sibling to give me a ride), I've lessened the car count on the streets by one. Reductions in our carbon footprint, however small and insignificant they seem, feel good. (The dangers of these 'feel good moments' and how they sometimes make us 'feel like we've done enough' are important to discuss as well, but perhaps I'll leave them for another blog post.)

I wonder whether the positive feeling comes instead from some other satisfaction -- a satisfaction rooted in traveling with people and sharing a space with these people whom you don't know but who are heading, at least in part, in the same direction before you all split into your separate, occasionally-overlapping lives.

Fashion

In recent months and especially in the last two weeks, I've started to become very interested in clothes and fashion. I'm not positively sure why, but I think it has partly to do with the fact that I'm graduating next year and can no longer rely on throwing on my uniform every day, and partly to do with the fact that I am feeling very academically inspired by my English teacher, and she happens to be extraordinarily fashionable. My best friend also has a stunning sense of style, and I occasionally think to myself that it would be nice if I could be a stylish as her (you could analyze it and say something about wanting to be as an amazing person as her -- she has spectacular character traits -- and transferring those traits to her clothes).

The reason why I find my sudden interest (borderline obsession, considering the amount of time I've been spending on online clothing shops without actually buying anything, Pinterest, Etsy, fashion blogs, etc.) in fashion so startling is because of my strong adversity to it in previous years. I had formerly told myself that fashion should be functional (which I still think is true), and devoting so much time and energy into fashion seems to be rooted in some sort of unfortunate values of artificiality and consumerism.

It occurred more recently to me that fashion may in fact be yet another form of art.

Life of Pi

I fell in love with Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil about a year ago. There was something beautiful in his luscious sensory language that kept me riveted and enchanted. Where some Victorian novels are (in terms of their descriptive language) like a very, very, very dense cake, and where some modern novels are so sparse in their use of language that they are so geometric and almost bleak, Beatrice and Virgil seemed to be just the right blend of descriptive language and plot.

Yesterday, I finished reading Yann Martel's Life of Pi. What an amazing story! It is considerably different from Beatrice and Virgil, although they both actively employ animals in their stories (albeit in very different ways). I highly recommend both Beatrice and Virgil and Life of Pi!

1984

About a week ago, I read George Orwell's 1984. I did the majority of my reading on in the airport, in the plane, in the car, and in the hotel in Halifax. Living in in the GTA, I would have thought I would have spent more time enjoying the outdoors of Halifax (especially considering the spells of nice weather that we had for two of the four days spent in Halifax), but I spent most of the time indoors at Dalhousie University and the University of King's College. The time I spent outside was mostly the 20 minute walks to and from the university and the hotel. I would have gone out more often, but it always seemed to be quite late when I finally came to the hotel, and by that point, my parents were quite tired to go with me, and they did not want me wandering around an unfamiliar city on my own at night.

So, I spent my evenings reading. Orwell's 1984 is a captivating and fast-paced dystopian novel. It is a social critique. Published in 1949 and set in the then-future 1984, the novel follows protagonist Winston Smith as he quietly attempts to challenge the oligarchical dictatorship of Big Brother's Party.

The premise of the dictatorship is the Party's ability to limit all thinking. There is no critical thinking in the society of Oceania. The language, Newspeak, is so limited in its vocabulary that it lacks all the beautiful subtleties and colours of today's English, known derogatorily as Oldspeak. Newspeak users speak in a quick staccato, and the language's quickness makes it so much easier to rush over the meanings of the words. You don't dwell on the words meanings because you don't have time. The word "Minipax," for example, which refers to the Ministry of Peace (which, oddly enough, concerns itself with war), is so easy to roll off your tongue that you don't think about the word "Ministry" and its meanings of institutions and hierarchical judgement. You don't think about the word "Peace" and its corresponding ideas of contentment, values, safety, security, and its opposing associated ideas of war, violence, discontentment, etc.

The book makes me wonder about Tumblr. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good (few hours?!) spent on Tumblr -- there are some posts that are absolutely hilarious! I wonder whether the pace at which we scroll through Tumblr though means that we don't have time to actively think about the images and text that we see and read. Instead we just digest it, without any sort of critical thoughts. We talked about this in English class a bit. It stuck with me, and came up again while reading 1984.

A draft of the introduction to the play that I am writing

Dim lights. A clarinet plays a light melody with a pure tone.

A large wooden chest is on the stage, just off the centre and to the right. It is deep brown and is perhaps made of mahogany. It gives the appearance of being altogether mundane, antique, and oppressively heavy. A lock keeps it tightly closed.

With slow and deliberate movements, a girl enters the scene. She appears about twenty-seven, although she could be older. Still, there is something in her movements that make her seem sixteen or seventeen years old. Perhaps it is her light step.

Eventually, she notices the wooden chest. She steps towards it, but hesitates. She takes one long, visible breath, and then approaches the chest, bends down, and touches the lock.

GIRL: It's funny how we forget some things and how we remember others.

Silence. There is no one around to answer her. She jiggles the lock lightly.

GIRL: I don't remember them giving me a key.

University Applications

Ask me to write a paper on Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and I'll write one, right away. It wouldn't necessarily be a good essay, but it would have some structure, and I would know how to take a theme from Tess and develop it into a thesis, which I'd then flesh out in my body paragraph before wrapping the whole work up with some sort of thought-provoking summation.

Ask me to write a paper on myself, and I'm lost.

Unfortunately, this situation is faced by countless number of youth across Canada and the world as post-secondary application deadlines approach. We haven't practised writing 400 word 'essays' on our deepest desires, so how can we possibly be expected to write effectively, eloquently, and efficiently?

On voluntary writing and blogs

It's a curious thing to find the blog of one of your teachers. I suppose I'm just not used to reading my teachers' writing outside of the context of handouts, assignment feedback, report cards, and the occasional e-mail.

Perhaps it is even odder when you find yourself thoroughly enjoying your teacher's blog, and reading pages and pages into the blog's archive.

Regardless, blogs themselves are a curious sort of medium. They aren't quite journal entries in the sense of a diary, but they are more or less a published journal. Anyone can read them, but few do. I doubt that there are many people who read this blog, and of the people who do read this blog, I doubt that any are 'regular followers.'

Still, people blog all the time, without a huge concern for who might or might not be reading their words. It is somewhat of a consolation to be able to write and then to go back and see that what you have written exists somewhere, even if the Internet is a somewhat abstract and elusive canvas.

I wonder if there is an art to blogging. If there is such an art, I am sure I have yet to master it. There are surely lots of blogs that are poorly done; blogs with ridiculously informal language, laden with grammatical errors, rude content, etc. Many blogs are pointless -- this one is perhaps one such pointless blog. However, the pointlessness of such a blog is maybe what attracts the writer to create it. We write so often because we must write; we write assignments, we write business e-mails, we write messages to people because we find it is socially acceptable to keep in touch by talking about the weather (and often also because we do actually want to keep in touch with them, but we just don't know how to go about it, especially when they live halfway across the country or halfway across the world). With a blog, though, you write because you want to write; there is nothing 'forcing' you to write.

I wonder when this blog will fall under and fade away. When will I forget about it? When will I stop going back to it and posting the occasional song lyric, ramble, or poem?

I think I will always write for pleasure, be it in this blog or elsewhere.

Homo sapiens to Homo narrans, the storytelling person

"I heard... two men talking about a third old man who had recently died. One of them said, 'I was visiting him at his home. He started to tell me an amazing story about something that had happened to him when he was young. But it was a long story. Night came, and we decided that I should come back the next day to hear the rest. But when I arrived, he was dead.'

The man fell silent. I decided not to leave that bench until I heard how the other man would respond to what he’d heard. I had an instinctive feeling that it would prove to be important.

Finally he, too, spoke.

'That’s not a good way to die — before you’ve told the end of your story.' "

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/opinion/sunday/in-africa-the-art-of-listening.html?_r=1&src=tp&smid=fb-share
By HENNING MANKELL
Published: December 10, 2011

On school and motivations

Are you living for the weekend, or are you living for the week?

The cities that we build

The other day, a friend and I were discussing human perceptions of the world. We settled on the idea that each of us build cities in our minds. The cities that we build exist as a result of our experiences, our memories, our admiration for our mentors, our perceptions of ourselves, and much more. Essentially, our cities are reflective of the world as we each see it, as well as how we see ourselves within that world.

Cities, however, are not stagnant. With the development of new technology, the immigration and emigration of residents, changing media values, growing personal values, and the occasional and unexpected storm or natural disaster, our cities are constantly having to be repaired, renewed, and revised to suit our needs and the needs of the rest of the world. An issue therefore arises when we, as the architects and engineers of our minds, fail to allow our cities to grow and change as they must. Inflexibility is a serious issue; in many cases, inflexibility goes hand in hand with brittleness and fragility. The collapse of our minds' cities is not an easy task to bear.

Objectiveness and Emotional Investments

I'm currently reading Shakespeare's masterpiece King Lear and have been thinking about how emotional responses to characters and empathy with characters can often cloud our argumentative judgement. If we're trying, for example, to analyze the character Cordelia, it is difficult to remain objective if we have emotionally invested ourselves in liking her character. Such is especially the case when viewing a well-acted and well-made film interpretation of the play, such as the PBS Great Performances series of King Lear directed by the talented Trevor Nunn (which can be watched at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/tag/trevor-nunn/). We are often moved to empathize with all of the characters in the play; the relationship between the Fool and Lear makes our hearts wrench, and some sympathy can even be felt for Lear's antagonistic eldest daughter, Gonoril.

The same can be said for life outside of literature. Our ability to empathize with the people around us is what makes us more kind, more compassionate, and more human. Empathy is often the basis of philanthropy. However, empathy is also often the basis for bias. How can we objectively analyze a situation, a person, or ourselves if we have become emotionally invested in a certain viewpoint or perspective?

choice emotions

Is happiness a choice?

And if so, is sadness likewise a choice?

What is depression, if emotions are all chosen?

And what is the feeling of spontaneous joy if or sudden heartbreak if it is all by choice?

What is life with emotions by choice?

And what is choice?

Post-Graduate Aspirations

It's the start of a school year, and high school seniors throughout the country are spending countless hours at university fairs, booking guided campus tours, and surfing an uncountable number of university websites. Despite the wide variety of available resources in our quest to identify our post-graduate aspirations, many of us still feel overwhelmed and confused.

With application deadlines quickly approaching, there is not only the pressure to improve and maintain grades and demonstrate commitment to extracurricular passions, but the 'obligation' to discover one's interests (and potential careers) seems stronger than ever.

It is important to remember, however, that post-secondary studies and activities are not about setting one's life path in stone. Rather, post-secondary studies is just another stage in life where each individual as even more opportunities to delve into the areas in which he or she enjoys, be they traveling, sciences, thinking, music, research, medicine, entrepreneurship, volunteer work, and so much more.

The difficulty therefore lies in determining one's passions and identifying what areas and fields are enjoyable. What does one do when one would like to do it all?

New Name, New Focus

Earlier today, I decided to change the title of this blog to Roundabout Contemplations. Inspired by Henrik Ibsen's master play "Peer Gynt" and Grieg's famous music to Peer Gynt, this change of title reflects a shift in focus. After much thought, I decided that a blog focused solely on my love for music isn't what I'd like to devote my writing to. I want this blog to not only be about music, Classical or otherwise, but also about the various thoughts that come my way and give me a new and different understanding of the world.

Of course, this focus change doesn't mean that I'll stop writing about music; after all, so much of my life revolves around playing piano, playing cello, studying music history, listening to Beethoven, Wagner, Jason Mraz, Dispatch, and much more. However, with this new blog focus, I will have a wider span of writing topics in which I may indulge.

It is also worth noting that along with the name and focus change, my blog will now be located at the following URL: http://roundaboutcontemplations.blogspot.com/

Please continue to enjoy my blog.

Recall

I'm trying to recall your face,
I haven't managed yet.
Why are half-remembered things
The hardest to forget?

- by JonArno Lawson

"Recall" is one of many of Lawson's short but thought-provoking poems in Think Again, illustrated by Julie Morstad. In only four lines, Lawson evokes the very particular feeling of struggling to remember something, be it a person's face, someone's words, a thought that you planned to write down but never got around to finding your pen, the name of someone important to you, the time you were supposed to meet him or her, or perhaps the name of the song whose melody haunts your mind.

Thought as a Form of Music

Today was our last day of classes at school, and yet it didn't really feel that way. We had one of my favourite classes for last period; it's a very thought provoking course, so once we it had finished, my friends and I were all a little sad about it being over. I suppose it might've been just a way of extending the course and avoiding saying goodbye, or perhaps it was just an attempt to procrastinate and avoid actually doing work and studying for exam finals, but we ended up going to the music room at school and just hanging out, thinking, and talking about identity, life, and emotions.

We were in a music room, and we weren't exactly singing or jamming on the instruments. There were no guitar cases open, no violin bows in our hands, no clarinet reeds between our lips... And yet, there is some sort of music-like feel in the thinking that we did today. Thinking has a rhythm and a flow, much like the way music does. And when you finally pull yourself from your seat, from the conversations, from the spoken thoughts to go home and get back to your studying and day-to-day life, you carry with you the feeling of thinking, the feeling of music, the feeling of I-thought-today and I-feel-good-about-it.

There's a sort of beauty in this 'music.' It's not exactly the same as instrumental, vocal, choral, orchestral, and all the other sorts of music... It's not Classical, it's not Pop, or Hip Hop... but it's beautiful all the same, and I'm very glad that we got to experience this beautiful music this afternoon. I may have not studied for my science exam, but in all truth, this was so much worth it.