“fun”

A Spanish version of Mika’s Billy Brown. Apologies beforehand, I just have this hobby of translating songs—if the mood strikes one day I may even hurt your ears with my French version of Gloria Trevi’s Hoy me ire de casa

Update 15/January/2007:

Billy Brown Oh Billy Brown had lived an ordinary life. Two kids, a dog, and a cautionary wife. While it was all going according to plan Then Billy Brown fell in love with another man. He met his lover almost every single day Making excuses for his dodgy holiday (Unto religion that he said and duty found They didn’t know his faith was earthly bound)	Juan Alazan Oh Juan Alazan vivia una vida primorosa Dos ninhos, un perro y una esposa fastidiosa Aun cuando todo iba yendo acorde al plan Juan Alazan se enamoro de otro galan. De ver su amante ningun dia se perdia Haciendo excusas por tan locas correrias En cierta religion nueva y extranha. Lo que no sabian es que su fe era mundana.
Brown…Oh Billy Brown. Don’t let the stars get you down. Don’t let the waves let you drown. Brown…Oh Billy Brown. Gonna pick you up like a paper cup. Gonna shake the water out of every nook. Oh Billy Brown.	Juan… oh Juan Alazan No te dejes por tus estrellas tumbar No te dejes por las olas ahogar Juan… oh Juan Alazan Habra que desdoblarse como carton Habra que sacudirse el agua de cada rincon. Oh Juan Alazan.
Oh Billy Brown needed a place, somewhere to go. He found an island off the coast of Mexico Leaving his lover and his family behind. Oh Billy Brown needed to find some peace of mind. And on his journey and his travels on the way, He met a girlie who was brave enough to say, When they made love he shared the burden of his mind. Oh Billy Brown you are a victim of the times.	Oh Juan Alazan tenia que huir a cualquier sitio. Encontro una isla costa de Puerto Rico, Dejando su amante y su familia por detras.. Oh Juan Alazan solo buscaba paz mental. En aventuras en su larga travesia, Conocio una chica que valiente le decia, Cuando hacian el amor y el desahogaba sentimientos, “Oh Juan Alazan eres una victima de los tiempos.”
Brown…Oh Billy Brown. Don’t let the stars get you down. Don’t let the waves let you drown. Brown…Oh Billy Brown. Gonna pick you up like a paper cup. Gonna shake the water out of every nook. Oh Billy Brown.	Juan… oh Juan Alazan No te dejes por tus estrellas tumbar No te dejes por las olas ahogar Juan… oh Juan Alazan Habra que desdoblarse como carton Habra que sacudirse el agua de cada rincon. Oh Juan Alazan.
[...]	[...]
Brown…Oh Billy Brown. Gonna pick you up like a paper cup. Gonna shake the water out of every nook. Oh Billy Brown.	Juan… oh Juan Alazan Habra que desdoblarse como carton Habra que sacudirse el agua de cada rincon. Oh Juan Alazan.
Oh Billy Brown had lived an ordinary life. Two kids, a dog, and a cautionary wife. While it was all going according to plan Then Billy Brown fell in love with another man	Oh Juan Alazan vivia una vida primorosa Dos ninhos, un perro y una esposa fastidiosa Aun cuando todo iba yendo acorde al plan Juan Alazan se enamoro de otro galan.

Boy, how much fun has this book been! Efrain Bartolome’s Educacion emocional en veinte lecciones [review] is exactly what the title implies —an emotional education, a coginitive-behavioral approach to learning to handle your emotions—, I just never thought it would be this much fun.

I stumbled on it combing the city’s book fair for books originally written in Spanish, as has been my custom for the last couple of years. It was a difficult choice, it was pricey ($200 pesos), had too facile a title and yet managed to be intimidating with its 300 pages of dense prose. It apparently lied somewhere between selfhelp and psychotherapy, both of which I dislike. But then its recency (2006), its being written by a Mexican UNAM professor, its initial quote:
its excellent typography (!), its suggestive index and its author being a renowned poet besides a psychologist made me put out.

I’m glad I did. Whatever the book’s merits the best compliment I can give it is that it has changed me, far more deeply that I can tell this close to the reading but I think and feel different ever since.

How not to love a book that manages to be densely precise and technical while still being fresh, humble, and (Mexicanly) casual—always struggling for clarity, for precision.

How not to love a book that manages to delve deep into theory while being chock-full of practical suggestions—always struggling to convince you, to change you.

How not to love a book that suggests buying a pornographic magazine as an exercise in selfcontrol, proposes a condom-buying dare, explains respiratory meditation, entrances you with the stream-of-consciousness of an addict, and finishes lessons by sprinkling a sufi story (the tale of the two brothers) or a beautiful metaphor (“Se como el sandalo que perfuma al hacha que lo hiere” / “Be like sandalwood that perfumes the axe that hurts it.”)?

If you care about selfhelp books this is by far the best I’ve ever read. If you care about psychotherapy this is by far the best I’ve ever read too (no Freudian bullshit!). I earnestly and sincerely recommend it, grab it wherever you can find it.

(I’m personally looking for extra copies to give away but Gandhi doesn’t have it in stock and its editor, Paidos, doesn’t list it online—do drop a message if you find it somewhere).

Apropos of Elie Wiesel, I’m in the strange process of choosing a name for myself that Americans can pronounce. Most automatically  call me “ely” (ee-lie, rhymes with fry) but I’m not a big fan. I think I’m going to go with “elie” (eh-lee, rhymes with jelly), which I like the sound of. Plus, I totally dig girlboy names.

A fun thing, renaming oneself. We should do it more often.

Boy, boy, boy. Syntax across languages, a massive compilation of programming language features, is so damn cool, so damn useful, so damn usable in its text-only simplicity, in its many angles to approach the collection (sorted by language or by categories, or all in one big page). If you’re a programmer you must bookmark this. Now. (If only a similar thing existed for general languages…)

For those armchair observers of the breathtaking world of quants and structured finance, as myself, Technology Review’s current issue carries a wonderfully didactic and gripping introduction, The Blow-Up: (pesky but FREE registration required).

Focused only in securitization, When it goes wrong, from The Economist (YubNub’s “eco“), is also a good overview and glimpse:

Answers.com (YubNub’s “a“), btw, is invaluable in navigating jargony fields like finance.

Vilayanur Ramachandran has a truly outstanding, enjoyable, and insightful TEDTalk, A journey to the center of your mind. Not only should you watch it for the content, pay attention also to the form—he is a master expositor. Besides, it contains one of the most convincing debunkings of Freudian bull ever (the first example).

(Fret not about having to decipher a strong accent. Aside from strong r’s, he’s extremely understandable and rather pleasant.)

What are you absolutely certain of? Of what are you sure without any conceivable doubt? What is true no matter what? What is necessarily true? Just one thing. Whatever. As long as you’re sure.

I’ve been playing the game for a while and I’ve been shocked to be unable to answer the question. Now, of course I’m familiar with Hume’s skepticism (you don’t really know an apple is going to fall, you’ve just seen all similar objects fall before at similar conditions but you don’t know) and I thought I knew how dear truth was but lately, slowly, I’ve started to realize that not even reason or logic are to be trusted.

Let’s start by quickly demolishing every statement about experience, like, say, that you are, well, you, that you broke your knee when you were fifteen, that your mother exists, that other people exist (solipsism). The usual shortcut is just to ask you how do you know it isn’t all a dream, but I prefer Russell’s more imaginative version, the extreme omphalos hypothesis: how do you know that the world wasn’t created five seconds ago, set in motion, and with fake memories? Clever, huh?

OK, that sweeps off a good big swath of possible answers. As for reason/logic, its problem is that it’s either redundant or not binding at all. But don’t 2 + 2 = 4 whatever fucking nightmare the world might turn out to be? How could time or space not exist? My gosh, can you look me in the eye, and tell me that numbers aren’t infinite? How demented do you need to be to doubt Aristotle’s syllogisms, the very rules of thought (if it’s true that humans are mortal and that Socrates is human, Socrates has to be mortal!)?

But it turns out these conceptual statements aren’t certainties either. When you probe them further, carefully, rigorously, you realize that to advance you have to start defining. If you do it conscientiously, defining or making explicit even the dumbest, most-taken-for-granted assumptions you start to realize that 2 + 2 = 4 because you said so, because you assumed your conclusion from the get-go, and your statements are true in the same empty way that a bachelor can’t be married or a car has to be an automobile too. Yes, it’s a kind of truth, but a rather measly one.

The other thing that usually happens when you probe concepts is one of the most wondrous experiences I know of, exhilarating and unnerving at the same time, dizzying. I call it sense of could. It means taking an entrenched concept and realizing it is not necessarily so, discovering your singularity is just an instance of something subtler, deeper, finding out your rose is one among thousands, seeing that what you thought fixed is just another degree of motion.

Like when Cantor found out there are many kinds of infinities, some bigger than others (!). Like when you realize logic isn’t the complete science Kant thought and open the gates to the non-classical logics. Like when you probe the very fabric of the universe by looking for primitives to space and time. More worldly, like when you question your ethics, your religion, your politics, and you find only possibility where you were looking for necessity.

Now, those two options, redundancy and non-necessity, are the ones I’ve always stumbled upon but I don’t really know that happens for every concept. Or neither do I know if you can dismiss all experience in one fell stroke. That is, I’m, of course, not even sure that you can’t be sure of anything. Would you care volunteering an answer? %(p)Or a question?)%

Our trusted old friend very, I just found out, comes straight from the Latin VERus, truth! It’s the same root that gives us VERitable, VERacity, VERism, VERdict, (“truth-speaking”), or the Spanish VERdad. Every single very you’ve gushed has been a truly in disguise. When you say, say, “Damn Ivonne, you’re very hot!”, what you’re really saying across millennia to Yvonne is that she’s truly hot. Which she is. Now aren’t you glad you read this blog religiously?

Right outside my friendly neighborhood store I found this tiniest of weeds clinging to life by the sidewalk. She’s doomed, I know, but how to tell her?