Spend enough time around electronics and youll start to hear the symphony. The case fan in the computer hums along at midrange Hertz, what, 8000 or so? The air conditioner hisses through the vents with five different notes, all in the fourth octave. The power lines behind the drywall add a deep bass buzz, and the televisions and monitors add a sawblade keening thats just inside the range of human hearing. At any given time around you there are probably over 50 different persistent tones, all barely audible, all playing endlessly, no beat or percussion or tempo to them, they just roll on. Its odd and sometimes a little frightening.
Once when I was younger my sister received a cheap Casio synthesizer for Christmas. A week after she got it she left it on with the volume down and one of our cats, Meow, that was his name, he was 25 pounds and could spread his corpulent body over any surface like he was a limp Dali plaything, he sat down on the keyboard. And he slept there for an hour or so, mashing together some ungodly 38-key chord that seemed like it was coming from the walls of our house, it came from every angle. And every time I take off my headphones and sit and listen and hear that eerie subrosa symphony of office electronics, Im always reminded of that noise.
We could chase the cat off of the keyboard (and we did, after a while) but theres nothing to be done about that everpresent electronic drone. Except listen to it. The only way to shut it out is with plugs or headphones because once you notice it you cant stop listening, its like a song stuck outside your head or like reading about how youre not supposed to stare into the sun and then you spend the rest of the day wanting and wanting to look straight into it.
Greg is insane. He sleeps in a cheap hotel room and spends great amounts of time at work. His veins bulge with caffeine. He has a simple life but I guess he must find it fulfilling.
I have been spending time working on one of his projects engineering a neural network to guess election results off of voter registration information and I am now on his schedule. 16 hours of work, 6 hours of sleep. Popcorn for breakfast and coffee for lunch. It is a different life and one that I havent lived since college, and its fun, for now its fun. I have been on Gregs schedule for two days and work is progressing.
Once when I was younger my sister received a cheap Casio synthesizer for Christmas. A week after she got it she left it on with the volume down and one of our cats, Meow, that was his name, he was 25 pounds and could spread his corpulent body over any surface like he was a limp Dali plaything, he sat down on the keyboard. And he slept there for an hour or so, mashing together some ungodly 38-key chord that seemed like it was coming from the walls of our house, it came from every angle. And every time I take off my headphones and sit and listen and hear that eerie subrosa symphony of office electronics, Im always reminded of that noise.
We could chase the cat off of the keyboard (and we did, after a while) but theres nothing to be done about that everpresent electronic drone. Except listen to it. The only way to shut it out is with plugs or headphones because once you notice it you cant stop listening, its like a song stuck outside your head or like reading about how youre not supposed to stare into the sun and then you spend the rest of the day wanting and wanting to look straight into it.
Greg is insane. He sleeps in a cheap hotel room and spends great amounts of time at work. His veins bulge with caffeine. He has a simple life but I guess he must find it fulfilling.
I have been spending time working on one of his projects engineering a neural network to guess election results off of voter registration information and I am now on his schedule. 16 hours of work, 6 hours of sleep. Popcorn for breakfast and coffee for lunch. It is a different life and one that I havent lived since college, and its fun, for now its fun. I have been on Gregs schedule for two days and work is progressing.
thee_blacklisted:
Popcorn and coffee, huh? You health nut... It's funny, your post reminds me a lot of John Cage, what he said about approaching all of life as if all sound were music just waiting to be heard, how you have to adjust your ears to try to do that, and then looky Cronenberg looks sort of like Cage nowadays -- all that white hair I'll be there soon myself.