Soliloquy on Music

This evening was the first time in... three months that I went out for a show, and rather longer since my last classical concert; I miss the Imperial College String Ensemble, and Nikita and Ken and all the rest. Tonight's performance was Sofya Gulyak at the keys of a heart-shattering Steinway (best not to forget the '& Sons'); Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, a completely russian collection of piano solos, and three encores!

I could only concentrate for the first half, my mind wandering wildly in the second to all sorts of places: memories of piano playing, my old teacher whom I cast aside after two years because the expection of progress was too much and I wasn't prepared to put in the hours; thence onto a reflection on the phenomenon* of piano playing itself, and music in general.

*every time I attempt to spell that word 'n's and 'm's play musical chairs and I have to tell them to wait until dinner's over

How odd that out of the melting pot of human evolution, social evolution and all the nuances thereof, that some hundred-odd people sit in chairs inside a 101-yea-old hall (interestingly, more than half as old as the oldest stone building in New Zealand, a cute now-shop in Keri Keri) and listen to the outpouring of years and experience and passion into an assemblage of metal, wood, spring-steel and black lacquer... and have the emotional engagement of a primary school assembly. Music is beautiful, as varied as the universe in character and delivery, so why do I opt to sit in a slightly comfy chair, in a crowd and settle into a selfish luncheon of notes? Yes, it plays to my personality a great deal, the private indulgence and abstract intellectual Platonism get along with my introversion like bits of string and Yo-Yo Ma... but the respectful silence between movements belies the conservatism that surrounds truly 'classically' classical music: where's the middleground between Tiesto and Barenboim?

Rapture, nearly orgasmic on occasion, is common for me, when listening to the right piece of music, though I can't think why. Barber's Adagio for Strings, Shostakovich's Piano Concerto #2, Handel's Queen of Sheba, and many more, ignite a fire of deep-seated pleasure in my heart - a few inches lower than my heart it seems - and the warmest, more comforting, familial wave dance like glistening shards out of that brazier. That classical music is familiar to me is crucial I think, the reward of knowing the future almost. Opera is definitely one of my chocolate liqueur of music: a treat that is rare and delicious, but it's not for every day, and unlike any sort of chocolate I enjoy opera partly because it's esoteric, I admit it, I'm a drawn to enjoy things that are associated with being superior and cliquey... but science says I have high self-esteem and I'm creative and gentle.

To be continued...

It's all fun and games until someone looses an

Written at my workstation paper forest on the 5th floor of the Science Centre at the University of Auckland

A month flies by, and another 1/36th of the allotted time for this little PhD has made memento of itself in piles of papers, a few more megabytes of data and rather a lot of small changes. Anyone who doesn't want to hear anything depressing skip to the life-spoiler-free line: it looks like this ☺ has got together with this ☺ and... got married, bought a house, got properly settled in - funiture and so on - and waited for a bit (+ 3 hot meals a day).

Something that has been building since arrival is the stress of being in a foreign country: being away from my darling brother and the rest of my family, even being separated from the minutiae of home - chocolate with high fat content, over-eager Easter advertising, music from proper on-the-corner pubs - and all the friends who have been scattered to the four corners of the world; every subtraction has had some form of compensation, but the legacy of all those things I miss is that nothing can quite replace them.

My housemates are lovely people, two of whom I'll be looking to house with in the near future, another lent me his jacket for my costume for the department pub crawl last night (more on that later), but the common area doesn't die until past midnight every night and the wall of my room does little to screen out background noise. Work is going alright but the lack of funding and managerial oversight (both of which aren't helped by the relaxed working attitude that pervades) make for a large number of irritating 'disconnects'... The University of Auckland doesn't even rank in the top 100 in the world for Chemistry, Imperial's up at #30, and yes, I know, I should be looking at the positives of being here however mustering the willpower to not be irritated by a chemicals and equipment store that's open for 2 morning hours only and a lab that's made my OCD snap on the marigold gloves and a hair-net. To be fair, there's nothing wrong or missing that takes anything more than patience - sometimes a lot of patience - to fix, and my own forgetful, fitful and floppy work ethic makes me feel like a mop made of rubber.

Well, I do get free coffee, so that's a plus, and top of the list of pros is my supervisor, a vibrant, intelligent veteran, a great carouser of science... but then he decides to visit Wellington for two weeks, and free coffee slides back into #1!

Having my girlfriend 34% around the world also sucks - that's about 15 hours by plane, 11 hours if I were a sound wave and 63 milliseconds if I were a happy photon in the world's most privileged optical fibre (thank you Wolfram Alpha). Things were really getting to a head, so I've started counselling: I can't say that talking all my troubles away is as good as cider, but 99% of Americans can't be wrong can they (they're never wrong, about anything, no, nothing... absolutely nothing, ever, they're Americans therefore they're not wrong, a country founded on rights can't be wrong, because they're American because they're always right*).

* [boyfriend disclaimer] Nothing directed at you honey, I've just been on reddit all afternoon and fuckers are trying to steal the internet... again!

Oh, and my laptop harddrive died and I lost my glasses.

☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺

Ah, onto the good stuff.

Last week was the MacDiarmid Institutes first Electrochemistry Boot Camp! It's alternate title is Cosmin Laslau's masterplan to get free food for the Easter weekend trip to a bach in Doubtless Bay with Monique, Anna, Jon, Karima, Tomas, Aphree, Hande, Dida, Vineet, Romel and Karthik... but the organisers thought that wouldn't fit on the programme. After an hour-long bus-ride up to the location in Huia Bay (a few rentable buildings overlooking a beautiful inlet, 15 minutes drive from the nearest store), it wasn't long before we were in lectures. My supervisor, David, a lecturer from Palmerston North, Simon, and a lecturer from Victoria University of Wellington, Alison, all delivered lectures over the rest of the evening and the next day: David asked for power (it went on the first morning), Alison asked for more time (but David and Simon stole it)... and Simon asked for wine (and, yes, he got it).

There was a lot of food: Cosmin, the go-to guy in the group for just about anything, had been charged with keeping everyone fed, watered (and ethanoled) and there was so much stuff left over at the end that the only thing that we needed to buy for our Friday-Monday bach trip was a bit of meat and... $250-worth of beer ☺. The boot camp had its free time, the surroundings yearned to be explored and a group of us hunted for the waterfall on the map on the outside of the kitchen and were disappointed by the two-foot trickle, that turned out not to be it.

The bus from the boot camp returned to campus on Thursday and, after a re-pack, all the aforementioned embarked on the 6 hour drive to Doubtless Bay. I figure at this point I should explain what baches are. They aren't long-lost brothers of the famous classical family, and they aren't a mis-spelling of where you might grow vegetables or flowers, or 'medicinal herbs'. A bach is the New Zealanders home away from home, a house for rent for weekends away. Doubtless Bay *checks wikipedia* is the reputed original landing of the Maori discoverer of New Zealand, a gorgeous collection of beaches and fun-to-climb hills. Baches dot the landscape.

Playing Irish Snap, Caps, cricket, The Resistance and going the beach, drinking beer, having BBQs.. it was a splendid break.

Getting back into the swing of things after basically a week off (uni was closed Tuesday) was slow, but I've finally done my first experiment! Of course, I'm now sitting here listening to Jim Carey sing with a lot of teeth on YouTube. There was also my costume to prepare...

The department costume party kinda exploded this year (so I hear). Twice as many people and some really epic costumes. From Tuesday to Friday, I was shopping and getting my costume ready, and I'm rather disappointed that I didn't take good pictures... I've dyed my hair black! I got hair gel, fingerless gloves, wire, aluminium foil and borrowed my housemate's jacket. I emerged as a pretty good Wolverine (a bouncer did tell me to take off my claws in one bar because I almost stabbed him in the eye). Romel and Tomas and Vineet turned out as a trio of mafia-style gangsters, Karthik's Clark Kent - with superman shirt underneath - was very cool, even beside the guy who came with full superman gear, cape and everything. Mars' was brilliant... anyone who hasn't seen Game of Thrones missed out, Mars' Khaleesi was amazing (come to think of it, the only thing besides a dragon on her shoulder would have been a horses heart slowly dripping blood onto the carpet).

Toodle-pip, let a smile show x