Eron's Ecstatic Blog

For our final project in AP Lit, I chose to read a book called “This is How It Always Is” by Laurie Frankel, which talked about the struggles of a transgender female growing up, and in research, I studied the actions and reactions of parents in regards to the established social constructs of gender norms. Research was not as available as I would have liked; novels focused more so on the children rather than the parents, papers had small participation rates, and case studies had a considerable lack of updated information. By searching for such a specific voice, I in turn learned a lot about what it means to be a parent, and how invaluable family is.

Prior to my research, I had always assumed that parents who had a negative reaction to their child’s gender transformations would not support their child, particularly younger children, in their transformation. It became immediately apparent to me that this was indeed not the case; the negative reactions of parents were a consequence of concern and worry about the child’s future and their acceptance into society, rather than an act of opposition. Of the parents I read about, there was a universal seed of doubt. Was the child merely going through a phase? Was the child actually certain of their new gender identity? Was the child going to be bullied in school? However, from that seed grew a tree of unconditional love and understanding, where as much as they were worried for their child’s future, they were innately supportive of their transformation. This surprised me, because from all the negative and hateful reactions to transgender individiuals, it is refreshing to know that the love of a parent supercedes pre-established boundaries. Parental love is a beautiful thing; even negative reactions are coupled by unconditional support.

Such questions, however, mark the sad reality of gender transformation. Where there is no gender neutrality, there will be no certainty of impartiality. Where there is no expression, there will be no affirmation. As judgemental as society is today, it is indubitable that such questions will have to be answered not as a member of society but as a parent to the child, and as a family. Strong family ties were an essential part of the successful transformations that I read about; Claude/Poppy was supported by her family as they moved to give him a new beginning, Jazz Jennings was supported by her family as they actively promoted her ideals to the global scale. In both scenarios, the child was not exempt from social stigma or any of the questions that might plague a parent initially, but in both scenarios, the child was able to comfortably and proudly develop themselves into their new identities because the parents acted as a shield while the child figured themselves out.

From my project, I hope that the inevitability of parental love and the resilience and value of family becomes apparent, rather than that societal norms are a limitation on the actions of parents, as much of the project details. It is much more of a beautiful thing to know that parents, at times elusively, will unconditionally love their children, no matter how they change.

At North, a fast-paced, highly competitive, and incredibly motivated environment, I learned that my own pace is plenty fast enough for me, and that the fastest way to run is to not trip over your own feet. Had I the chance to go back and do highschool once again, I would have told myself to focus more on personal projects and my own learning, rather than tiring myself out on clubs that never accurately described who I was or what I was interested in. Things I did not enjoy, I should not have stuck with, things I did, I should have done more of. As for incoming seniors, I think that too is also important; working on yourself is a great way to figure out the age old question “what do I want to do in college? In the future?” or similar offshoots. I would never have known that I might want to specialize in light transport research had I never taken the time to learn about rendering; I likely would not have known it existed.

To the future seniors: colleges love you for you, so be you, do you, and you’ll be okay.

Link to website: https://ap-literature-final-project.eronristich.repl.co/
If text is clipping, try zooming out and then reloading before perusing the source code (which is linked on the site)

The short answer? 750; at least so this assignment dictates. The other short answer? Proverbially, 1000; at least so the common English adage dictates. But to your everyday AP Literature student who only has the time to give his 2 cents on something before another assignment is due, how many words is this picture worth? The long answer? Let’s find out.

At first glance, this image is of a green, swampy land, the air filled with dense, moist condensation. Are we done? Not yet, I still need at least 661 more words for this assignment.

Jokes aside, this picture is truly quite beautiful, and a keen representation of nature. The main focus of the image is the landscape itself, the misty meandering river flowing abrasively through the green land. In a way, it forms a ditch, the erosion of which, considering the considerable lack of volume of water, must have taken hundreds of years, if not thousands of years, to develop such a smooth ridge. To the point of smoothness, it is a wonder how the sparse, almost dead, land in the foreground is so considerably more textured than the smooth green immediately behind it. Why might one patch of land be spiked with grass and branches and general foliage, whereas the land adjacent to it is softened by a greenery so much so like the water that cuts through it, the boundary between the two more like a waterfall than solid earth. For all we know, it may not be solid.

I could go on like this for who knows how long, noting random details, and hopping down rabbit holes. Turns out, an excellent way to have more to say about things is rather counterintuitive; why say more, when you could simply say, more. Quantity over quality, an idea of which certainly leads pictures to easily be worth a thousand words. Can quantity and quality coexist? Or, for that matter, is quality necessarily coherent?

Eloquence is not to be mistaken with value, and although it is a common mistake as a result of the best writers writing in confusing but achingly artistic ways, it is an inexcusable one, or so says the incessant pledge of the English teacher. Quantity and quality are not mutually exclusive; after all, Shakespeare’s plays are held in high regard, but are also high in presentation time. How come his plays that leave so many questions unanswered, and have thus spurred countless arguments, are works of quality, but the straightforward, unambiguous, and much more pleasurable reading experience of Geronimo Stilton is not held in the same light?

To that matter, why tell stories at all? Why spend time preaching about morals in a form so ambiguous that its definition is questionable? Perhaps it is inherent to attach sentiment to human experience, and thus by stories, people can learn by feeling, rather than simply being told.

Then why a picture? They are only a fragment of a story yet untold, a moment detached from explanation, a frozen slice of reality. How is it that a picture can convey anything at all, or have any value other than purely description? How is it that a single picture can mean a thousand words but a single word can only mean one?

What story does our picture tell? Or first, how can we say it’s our picture? I found it, but I didn’t take it. You’ve only read about it from some guy on the internet. Who’s to say the picture is even real? I found it on a random picture generator website.

Even the most random things have stories; so goes the English paradigm. Phrases have stories; “baby shoes, unworn,” a sad tale, perhaps of a miscarriage, of misfortune. Our picture has a story too, I like to think. One of a photographer waiting for just the right moment of sun to glean brightly, for the mist to swirl mysteriously, for the green marshes to sparkle with a brilliantly dull sheen. Of the art of patience, truly an art, for in nature, there is no frame better than the perfect moment of time. Is mother nature an artist? Or a confused woman pursuing a passion left carefully attended to, yet with no direction other than what meets the eye?

So it goes that pictures and moments of time, or anything for that matter, are merely prompts for the continued thought of man… and that pictures really are only worth 750 words.

Word ladders is a childhood game that is always a good pastime and brain teaser, and its many variations have countless possibilities for styles of wordplay. Essentially, players are given two words of the same character length, for example “cat” and “bob,” and starting with the first word, changing one letter at a time to different English words, they must end up with the other word.

In the above example that might look as follows:

CAT
BAT
BOT
BOB

Great! What can we do with this?

Other than passing the time, word ladders are a great way to learn letter patterns and phonics, but of course, that’s not what I’m interested in. Word ladders have an underlying assumption that there are enough English words to almost justify choosing any two words of the same length at random, and a word ladder is able to be formed. Is this the case?

It certainly seems so for three letter words, as almost every word ladder consists of 3 transformations, one each for the first, second and third characters.

Take for example “age” to “era.”

AGE
ARE
ERE
ERA

This isn’t the case, however, for “old” to “new,” as each combination of direct replacement does not result in an English word. This ladder, however, can be solved instead in 5 transformations.

OLD
OUD
FUD
FED
FEW
NEW

As one might imagine, the longer the word, the longer the word ladder. How might one find the words that don’t have word ladders to each other? Or how might one find the word ladders between two given words?

Fortunately for us, we’re lucky enough to have incredibly powerful tools called computers that can computationally determine this for us. A good way to represent a word ladder is using trees, which is a data structure that correlates nodes with the nodes that result from transformations on the original node, where, in our case, each node represents a single word.

The simplest solutions, while not necessarily best, are more than sufficient. We start with our first word as the origin of our tree, and generate its branch nodes by considering all possible words that can be generated by altering a single character in that word. If we repeat that process on each branch node, eventually we’ll get to the target node. This method is called breadth first search, and will effectively find the shortest path to the target node.

 

The key word here is, unfortunately, eventually. Our current algorithm is prone to lose computation time redundantly checking nodes it has already considered, and considering the volume of three letter words alone (around 16000, which is notably very close to the set of all combinations of three letters, being 26*26*26=17576), there are on average 20 words that the first node can transition to, 400 in the next layer, and 8000 in the third layer. If we remove redundancies, then our computation time can be significantly reduced.

In addition to this, we can search in reverse. As word ladders are a reversible construct, i.e. the path from ‘cat’ to ‘bob’ is the same as from ‘bob’ to ‘cat,’ this means we can search through our tree in reverse as well. Now, instead of searching only from the first word, we develop two different trees and for each of our new branch nodes, we check to see if a duplicate has arisen. This way, we reduce the number of layers searched by the original tree by a factor of 2, reducing the number of nodes checked by a factor of some number much larger than that.

Additional optimizations might consider the use of heuristics, which is a metric to compare how close words are to each other, which might first look at nodes that have the highest lexile similarity to the target node, or have the most number of characters that are the same as in the target node.

However, if the trees are allowed to generate until no additional nodes can be added to the end of the tree, there will be a number of words that have not yet been explored. Generating trees using those nodes leaves again a number of words that have not yet been explored, and repeating the process will result in several word webs, where words in each web cannot reach words in a different web.

So with this, what can we say about word ladders? Well, word ladders are great for identifying words that rhyme, notably that as long as the final vowel and everything following it are the same, then the two words rhyme. Word ladders are great for coming up with variable names. Word ladders are also great for learning about words that you never even knew existed before.

With that, I leave you with the longest word ladder that the Oxford dictionary has to offer:

ATLASES
ANLASES
ANLACES
UNLACES
UNLACED
UNLADED
UNFADED
UNFAKED
UNCAKED
UNCAKES
UNCASES
UNEASES
UREASES
CREASES
CRESSES
CROSSES
CROSSER
CRASSER
CRASHER
BRASHER
BRASIER
BRAKIER
BEAKIER
PEAKIER
PECKIER
PICKIER
DICKIER
DICKIES
HICKIES
HACKIES
HACKLES
HECKLES
DECKLES
DECILES
DEFILES
DEFILED
DEVILED
DEVELED
REVELED
RAVELED
RAVENED
HAVENED
HAVERED
WAVERED
WATERED
CATERED
CAPERED
TAPERED
TABERED
TABORED
TABORET
TABARET
CABARET

Happy climbing!

Although created by opposite sides of the brain, coding and poetry are not that different. Hear me out.

Poetry is a form of art; a way for a poet to express sensations in a creative fashion that can be kept and referenced as a sort of societal pamphlet, giving readers insight into the lives of the poet. Fundamentally, however, poems function as art, characterized by linguistic beauty and met with a keen eye that looks not for anything in particular except meager satisfaction.

On the other hand, or perhaps merely a few fingers away, code is also a form of art; a way for a programmer to express cool and hard logic in a creative fashion that can be kept and referenced as a sort of algorithmic pamphlet, giving computers insight into their own value. Fundamentally, however, programs function as tools, characterized by the tireless search for efficiency and met with a keen eye that looks only to reduce the time spent on a task.

There are parallels between them that go beyond the presence of english characters in each. Both act as a means to bring about change in the world, poetry interacting via politics, programs via data, and yet at large it is thought that they diverge where poetry is almost meant to be beautiful, and where code is not.

Code, however, is accompanied by a characteristic called elegance, one that is fashioned by the beautiful art of optimization, and fueled by the backbone of poetry; creativity. Just as a genius poet might consider all literary techniques a thesaurus can handle, and weave them together into a directed masterpiece, a programmer is given a similar toolset in order to most efficiently, effectively, and beautifully, perform some task.

Elegant code is not code golf, where competitors seek to complete tasks in the shortest possible number of characters (see here), and nor is it merely code that functions. Elegant code is readable, takes a complicated problem and solves it simply, and is a solution that seems so obvious and genius and intricate in hindsight, and is coupled with the sense of satisfaction equatable to finally understanding a poem.

But what-ho! You say. That’s not poetry, because in poetry any arguable interpretation is valid (see Perrine). Code isn’t arguable!

And that’s absolutely correct, code executes the exact same way, every single time. Same input, same output. Every. Single. Time. Right?

Wrong!

Technically… And of course being technically correct is the best kind of correct, or so a programmer would say (and maybe a poet).

Formally, that is a correct statement. Computers can only operate on ones and zeroes, and everything outside and in between is merely some combination of the two. However, a very useful stipulation called random numbers makes programs have the capacity to be much more fluid and natural. Well, again… technically.

Randomness in computers is actually pseudorandom, meaning usually it involves hashes — here referring to values that may or may not be consistently passed — passed to some arbitrary evaluator. Usually this means taking something that changes about the computing environment, such as an internal clock or atmospheric noise, and scrambling it with some trigonometric functions to receive a “random” input.

Randomness is actually quite prone to elegance in code, and a lot of the modern frontier of computer science focuses on just how useful randomness is. The fundamental use of random values is to check cases arbitrarily when there are too many cases to work through, which leads to a lot more applications than one might think, and a lot of them come up in the pride and joy of programmers: sorting algorithms.

Quicksort is an algorithm that selects “pivot points” within a dataset and partitions the data into two sets based on whether the element is greater than or less than the selected pivot point. When computed recursively, meaning that the same process is repeated on each partition until each partition has a length of one, and thus cannot be split, the sorted set will be a combination of remaining elements and the set of partitions. This process, in big O notation, which is a count of total iterations, has a length of the number of items squared, or n^2, which for sets greater than tens of thousands is incredibly slow. Pseudorandom partition selection has an outcome of, on average, n log n, which is incredibly more efficient than without it, and requires less auxiliary space than merge sort, a similar n log n recursive sorting algorithm. It is in that mischievous way that randomness can be elegant.

We’ve talked a lot about the elegance of code, but what does that have to do with poetry? How do you write code like a poet?

Truthfully, elegance has nothing to do with it.

Make it work beautifully and you’ve got yourself a flying chance at art.

Sonnets from the Portuguese 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Despite its title, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 43rd Sonnet from the Portuguese, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” is not an attempt to quantize her feelings for her equally poetic husband, Robert Browning, as she leaves her claim of doing so purposefully unfulfilled, but rather a qualitative comparison of her love for him and her own capacity to love, the former begging to exceed the latter.

The fact that she loves her husband very much is beyond apparent, the second and third lines encapsulating her love that is felt “to the depth and breadth and height [that her] soul can reach,” leaving, metaphorically, no room for anything else. Within the 14 lines of the poem, she writes “I love thee” 8 times, excluding the title, which includes another. She nails home that her love for him is unwavering and pure and full of passion, and that there is no possibility of being able to love him more, all within the first few lines. How and why, then, does she have so much else to say?

I have, I believe, the reasonable assumption that sonnets are written with every word being well structured and filled with intent and purpose. Of popular forms of poetry, only the sonnet has such defined structure to it; each sonnet consisting of 14 lines — 3 quatrains and a couplet — each line consisting of typically 10 syllables phrased in iambic pentameter — as Browning does here. Such structure is not limiting in the sense of creative freedom, but purely in word count. If every word were 2 syllables long, a poet would only have 70 words to work with, which, for context, this paragraph is already way beyond.

When every word counts, it is difficult to imagine the depth behind each line and word of this poem. Some words can be safely ignored, namely “I love thee,” as its repetition is worthy of note but not overanalysis, but most cannot, each conjunction and adjective and preposition providing more than a little context for each line. Take, for example, the twelfth line, “I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life.”

Each word serves a unique purpose. She separates possession of her breath, smiles, and tears, by only laying claim to her own life, showing how, in effect, those breaths, smiles, and tears are of consequence of having her life. This is emphasized by her distinctive “the” as opposed to “my,” which she applies later to describe her possession of her life. Beyond that, looking at each of the three, “breath” appears the most neutral, “smiles” has a positive connotation, and “tears” a negative one. As for why she mentioned all three could be indicating how irregardless of her own state and livelihood, she believes that her love for him remains constant.

Immediately after, she writes that “if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death,” ending the sonnet in perhaps an effort to demonstrate how her love is one that transcends death, but also declaring that her love is subject to change via God’s will. She also loses a word from the more common phrase “I shall naught but,” which is a creative, and still recognizable, way in which she conserves the number of syllables she has available to use.

The issue with such limitations in structure is that a lot more is left ambiguous. “I shall but love thee better after death” makes little to no sense; why would she say that she can love him with her breath, smiles and tears, which encompasses the fallible reality of human life, if she has the capacity to love him more after death? By mentioning God, the easiest assumption is that life in heaven is liberating; without earthly troubles, love can be a sole focus, but yet, she claims loves him with those imperfections as much as she loves him with much else.

An interesting consequence of this difficulty is that, as metaphors and other figurative language are derived from, she relies a lot on comparisons, and along with said difficulty, each comparison is equally inexplicable. Each “I love thee” introduces another comparison, where she demonstrates love in a slightly different way. Other than the ones I already mentioned, she loves him “to the level of every day’s most quiet need… freely… purely… with the passion put to use in my old griefs and with my childhood’s faith… with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints.”

That’s a lot of ways to describe something, and does not entirely mitigate the issue of how much is “a lot.” Several lines compare her love for him to sensations of daily life — which provides more context than merely other concepts — such as “to the level of every day’s most quiet need,” which frankly leaves more questions asked than answered. What is every day’s most quiet need? How can a day even have needs? They are lines that are written beautifully and elegantly, but feel as if just a little more is necessary for them to be understood, voids of which the reader themselves have to fill in.

The difficulty of fully understanding such a poem is the inherent structural ambiguity of the sonnet form, and logical arguments that rely solely on assumptions to perform, a combination of which leaves me to wonder just how much I might be missing from the love I give, and whether or not it’s even worth it to count the ways from which love exists, or maybe that’s just too confusing. However, for all it’s worth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s answer is 8.

The beauty of poetry, as with anything, is in the eye of the beholder, but the definition of poetry itself is quite broad. It aims to convey some idea, or maybe some unique stylistic choice, or maybe nothing at all, which is somewhat significant by itself. To that end, there are several forms of poetry: sonnets, haikus, ballades. However, to me, there is none more interesting than those free of form, freeform poetry.

For some reason or another, poets are rebels and anarchists. They take the well structured, well defined languages of the modern era and ignore it, choosing instead to focus on merely its objects; words. Nonetheless, some poets are better at it than others. Is there a “correct” way to tear apart the very fundamentals of human communication? If not, how far can we take it?

Clearly the second question is much more interesting than the first, so let’s assume for sake of my own amusement that there certainly is not a correct way to unravel the fabric of society and that there certainly is not an incorrect way to do so. With that in mind, allow me to introduce my good friend and longtime companion, Bayes Boll.

Handsome lad, isn’t he? He’s a lovely poet as well. With a magnificent glee as he tears across the keyboard in a frenzied fervor, dastardly tarnishing its sleek design, he writes in seconds what the greatest poets could never have even dreamed to create.

An example, if you will:

“Apwdkfp”
Bayes Boll

Awadwojpw adpok wapoj opwopiefaowo wpoiaw poijfpep moiamew aoipa
Apwdadw wdfakjpo aodfjawp eoe impi japoi po jawa ewp oijawpoe ipjoipoi aw ef
Apw fwp apf paoafw epofeawj oewafjapowkdjfawip mewpohzopkjpo
Awpdjaf okfew p faewj paofewawoi

Awpodf opkdwj afwp fwipojfp awoeipfow ijaepfoiajewopf ajpo
Awpfkj poadwjkpo dfjajwpofeopfapo wekjfpoawfjdafwopdwfjpoiw
Kw dpofpao weijfopawfkdfjo poeiwjfpoja wopfajweopo awiepfowij poeafjawfokjao
Apowkje opafwka jwepo iawjfopaw eajwfo paweij fawep

Apwokfjapo wjfpwaodifpoawek jfpoaewij
Awpfojawefjaop
Ap

Truly fantastic, now allow us to analyze this poem. I find it quite significant that this poem is structured into three stanzas, the first two are quatrains, the third being the sole outlier with only three lines, a clear demonstration of his moral but unsatisfied plea for self gratification.

His creative and selective use of twice the number of spaces is reminiscent of the fate enforced rift of acceptance and reality, the daredevil triple space in the third stanza truly nailing home the singularity of his struggle, and how such insignificance ultimately is the sole cause for innate corruption.

Not to mention each line starts with the vowel “A”, save for the 7th line, his creative use of the consonant character “K” showing that the sharp inconsistencies in his life does not have an effect on his stream of consciousness and strong determination.

Now while at first glance, his poem might appear to be utter nonsense, as I have explained, it is quite the opposite, and, while perhaps not to this extent, sometimes poetry feels a lot like that: nonsense. Is it okay for a poem to be nonsensical if it was made with purpose and the intent to exhibit creativity? I’d think so.

Poetry isn’t so much about interpretation or understanding (although that’s a nice bonus) as it is about expression. Bayes Boll, as shown through his poem, is clearly conflicted, and upon interviewing him, he told me a little about his inspiration for this work of art.

He began with his life story, a sad tale about being forced to leave his family and being thrown around by grown men with no other apparent ambition than to throw him harder and harder. More heartbreaking, he described how he was bullied by the local gang, the Bad Bat Bandits (shown below).

He told us then that the poem was an outcry of his anguish, an anger of which stemmed from a lifetime of abuse and neglect, a hunger for relief that was satiated by his poetry and his art. Oh, and that the spaces were an accident because he was typing too fast.

In retrospect, our perfectly logical interpretation that made complete and total sense was completely and totally wrong, and that’s perfectly okay. As consumers of poetry rather than authors, there’s a certain due diligence that must be conducted to respect the work as it is, because even if it is misunderstood, it was created with intrinsic purpose and not explicit purpose. In other words, poetry is written by the poet for the poet, and for others to get a glimpse of the poet’s world.

And don’t worry; no baseballs were harmed in the writing of this blog.

In a world where natural beauty comes in solid colors — the plains green, the deserts brown, the tundra white, the sky blue — flowers are a necessary and outstanding flair. They are so beautiful in fact that humans are not the only ones to appreciate them, the bumble bee being attracted by their unique color. 

And yet, being colorblind, and in a now vividly colorful world, I still find flowers to be just as beautiful and unique. If not its distinct color, what makes flowers so beautiful?

From a physical point of view, they are incredibly aesthetically pleasing. Beauty tends to be scientifically inexplicable, but they are beautiful in the same way that computer generated fractals are. The profound order and grace that comes in the simple spiral of a rose or kimono of a tulip is recognizable and appreciable. Being of a patterned nature makes flowers pleasing to look at, and for things that are recognizable, we can attach meaning to.

When something has implicit meaning, it can be used as a powerful communication device. A bee needs a flower to survive, as does the flower need the bee, but humans need the flower to convey sensations and concepts that can’t be described in words. A rose for love and passion, a sunflower for respect and adoration, a daisy for innocence and purity, each being feelings that are most elegantly described with a flower.

Having meaning does not mean having beauty, but having sentiment almost certainly does, and flowers beg for our sentiments. Within a flower lies the inherent question of “what does this mean to you?” which in itself is not a beautiful question, although its answer is. In that manner, flowers bring focus and direction to those who lost it, with its metaphysical beauty.

Its beauty is hardly limited to physical characteristics, but has scientific beauty as well. Be it by scent, color, or size, countless insects and animals, pollinators, are attracted to flowers. They require the flowers for life, as do the flowers require them, for the nectar they provide is nourishing, while the ability to pollinate improves the species’s chance of survival. What appears almost artificial to the human eye is an alluring, beautiful, and tasty morsel to those pollinators, a natural beauty that was designed to appear unnatural. 

If such beauty is unnatural, how then can it be so universal? There’s a famous saying that goes “to each, their own,” and yet the subjective statement that “flowers are beautiful” seems to be one size fits all.

I like to think that flowers are ultimately beautiful because they are so unique, because they stand out so much, not only to the bees and the pollinators, not only to the gardener who nurtured them from seeds, but to nature itself. For the same reason that jewelry is a prized accessory — small pieces of metal and expensive shiny rocks that emanate a refined beauty — so too are flowers beautiful, for they dot the landscape in a way that is purposeful but random, yet satisfying. 

Flowers are a symbol, and as much as they represent love and kindness and forgiveness they can represent other things, but to me, they represent life.

Flowers lead, sadly, short lives, yet oddly inspirational ones, especially for being an immobile plant with no apparent similarities to a human other than the capacity to live. All parts of their short lives have been religiously idolized in literature, poetry, music, from the origin of a seed, its first roots, its first bloom, and as it begins to wilt. Life is almost best summarized in that way, for we strive to grow, to set our own roots into the world, to bloom and be happy and beautiful, and to wilt away satisfied. 

And yet, flowers are beautiful still in the moment, and as one walks through a garden, the appreciation of beauty is the appreciation of life itself, for rain or shine, the flower remains, if not steadfast, unique, alive, and thus, beautiful. For, like us, they sprout, they bloom, they wilt. For, like us, they live their lives as a unique being, unnaturally natural. For, like us, they are diverse, in the shape of a mathematicians favorite fractal, or the size of a butterfly’s wing. 

For, like us, flowers are beautiful in ways that cannot be described simply with words, but can be felt with a profound certainty. 

When I see a flower, I do not think about what it means to me, or how it makes me feel, or even think at all, for there is beauty in experience When I look away, life goes on.

To the great joy or annoyance of many, Christmas is a time of a very small, and oddly similar selection of Christmas tunes, with classics such as Pachelbel Canon in D or Last Christmas. In fact, most Christmas songs have all become timeless classics, the original hymns of Jingle Bells or Jolly Ol’ Saint Nicholas never forgotten, just as recent explorations reach similar popularity. What makes Christmas music sound so similar? What makes it Christmassy?

It’s not the Christmas spirit, the recognizable name Santa, or the spirit of giving that gives us this music. Rather, it’s the combination of social stigma and an excellent chord progression.

Everything started with the bane of any bass player’s existence: Pachelbel Canon. 

D, A, B, F#, G, D, G, A; these notes are repeated over and over. It’s a nuisance, but a genius nuisance, because in the key of D, these bass notes are the ones that create a plethora of impressive, and fortunately harmonious, chords, inspiring countless other artists to replicate this in their own music (or arguably, all music, but that’s a different story). 

Despite these notes constantly returning to the tonic (the first note in the scale, D), the chords produced by the canonical form are inherently different as more and more layers are added. It’s “stacking” effect means chords transform from thirds to triads (three notes stacked in thirds) to sevenths, meaning a unique chord progression can result despite the incessantly repetitive bass. 

However, that doesn’t answer the question about what makes Christmas music Christmassy, even though the nature of the canon is imperative to it. When we think Christmas, we think sleigh bells ringing, children singing, and in modern times, Netflix binging. The holidays are a time of comfort, fire places, and the assurance of tradition. A consequence of that is not only the instrumentation of Christmas music (typically bells and strings), but also the peppiness, recognizable lyrics, an odd obsession with the key of D, and despite the joy, many, many, many minor chords.

Take Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet for example, arguably the most accomplished Christmas composer and composition, and is performed incessantly after Thanksgiving. As an orchestrated piece (before the time of Christmas bells), Tchaikovsky nailed in the idea that minor chords are most effectively employed when they resolve into a major key. 

The opening harp in Waltz of the Flowers is, most simply put, interesting. It has no coherent melodic line, and its effect is more ambient than lyrical. What makes it so great to dance to? Well the next part is what makes it great — the powerful, lyrical, major, simple, and soaring baritone — but the dissonance before makes the resolution seem more hopeful and forward thinking, one of the many ideals of Christmas: looking ahead.

Just as the Nutcracker is a traditional performance, tradition is a large part of the Christmas scene, which is a contributing factor to why it’s difficult for new artists to enter, and why the oldies are so great. Irving Berlin’s White Christmas is the forever iconic definition of Christmas ideals, and promptly describes the sentiments of past Christmases, particularly in the lyrics “just like the ones I used to know” before he describes the winter wonderland before him. But even his strict pursuit doesn’t stop him from what will forever be known as Christmas: sleigh bells. It doesn’t matter if your piece of music is happy, sad, upside down, turned around, or in the key of D double flat five seven and three halves. Put sleigh bells in, and you’ve got yourself a Christmas song, no questions asked. It’s like the famous SNL skit about cowbells: Christmas music is a disease, and the cure is more sleigh bells. 

Perhaps the best way to have successful Christmas music fully in the Christmassy spirit is to have a movie about it. Great Christmas classics like Home Alone or Die Hard made Christmas music a staple in the holiday home, and for good reason. Inevitably the stories told between the heroic protagonists of Kevin McCallister and John McClane (apparently having Mc in your name is a prominent feature of Christmasdome) were memorable and respectable, and it was in the movie theater that Christmas jazz became the staple cafe music for the season.

And despite how hard you might try, listening to Christmas music before the great night won’t land you a spot on Santa’s nice list, but its natural uplifting beat, reminiscent of warm times, and prospective of many great Christmases to come will certainly land Christmas as one of the greatest holidays of all time. Unless of course you celebrate Hanukkah, then Hanukkah Sameach! But regardless of the holiday, the music holds the same uplifting ideals of excitement and community.

Merry Christmas,

Eron (Mc)Ristich

With the holiday season coming up and the new Covid-19 restrictions in place, Jolly ol’ Saint Nicholas is in quite the predicament. His reindeer refused to fly with him, quoting the six feet social distancing requirements, but it’s now more than ever before that the good grace of Christmas is needed. He takes this job to NASA, opting to drop gifts from space after thoroughly sanitizing them with moon rocks. Little did he know, however, that everyone and everything at NASA is all being conducted using palindromes as a standard, and Santa was hired immediately upon finding that his position at NASA would satisfy those conditions precisely. 

But what is a palindrome anyways?

A palindrome is a symmetric set of symbols, meaning that if you change the order of the objects in the set by reflection, the modified set and the original set should be the exact same. Of course, it’s never that simple. Going by that definition, sets don’t necessarily have to be one dimensional, as they typically are. What would a two dimensional palindrome look like? For text, it might look like the following:

But wait! You say. That’s not a word! It’s not, but it could be. This palindrome is symmetric in two dimensions, horizontally and vertically, and it introduces some curious ideas. When such lines become infinitely small, a palindrome could be a symmetric arrangement of points.

That means that a square is a palindrome, that this thing is a palindrome:

Cool! But what does this mean? After all, language doesn’t have infinitely small characters, at least, not coherent ones. We’ll return to that in a moment, but for now, our Santa has encountered another predicament: he doesn’t know any palindromes, and he can’t communicate with geometry! To begin to get a grasp of the situation, he looked around his workplace.

One man would incessantly introduce himself to women around the office, saying “madam I’m Adam” like a broken record. Another would sit deep in thought talking to himself, and Santa briefly overhead him asking “do geese see God?” 

The list of future projects on the geometrically patterned front wall similarly reflected the palindrome ideals.

 

To-do:

• Racecar 
• Taco cat
• Repaper
• Straw warts

 

But there was also an ominous message: “On a clover, if alive, erupts a vast, pure evil; a fire volcano!” Santa began to question the astronomical aims of the organization, but was distracted by plaque on the wall that read:

 

S T E P

T I M E

E M I T

P E T S

 

Now that was a motto he could get behind. The ideal still on his mind, he was startled by a dark blur that rushed across his vision. “Was it a cat I saw?” he asked in surprise.

“Looks like you’re getting the hang of it” replied the Manager.

With his new rough understanding of how palindromes might work, Santa got to work on his naughty and nice lists.

“Dennis, Nell, Edna, Leon, Nedra, Anita, Rolf, Nora, Alice, Carol, Leo, Jane, Reed, Dena, Dale, Basil, Rae, Penny, Lana, Dave, Denny, Lena, Ida, Bernadette, Ben, Ray, Lila, Nina, Jo, Ira, Mara, Sara, Mario, Jan, Ina, Lily, Arne, Bette, Dan, Reba, Diane, Lynn, Ed, Eva, Dana, Lynne, Pearl, Isabel, Ada, Ned, Dee, Rena, Joel, Lora, Cecil, Aaron, Flora, Tina, Arden, Noel, and Ellen sinned,” he wrote to his managers approval. Santa was ready to take to the skies.

Making palindromes isn’t easy, but the best way to make sentences out of a palindrome is to experiment. Starting with a word, reverse it and see what parts of the word seem feasible as the beginning or end of another, in essence building a phrase from words. Alternatively you can start from the middle and go out, to a similar effect. Santa however, began to appreciate the more elegant, albeit complex, form of font symmetry; ambigrams.

Ambigrams are typically the calligraphic art of symmetric fonts which most typically encompass one word, and rarely a phrase. Characteristically, these fonts have incredibly ambiguous distinctions between letters, presenting the unique challenge of making them, but also making them difficult to read. Beautifully written below the crown mold was Newton’s most famous discovery:

Santa’s adventures did not end at the top of the wall. Entering the cafeteria introduced a new plethora of palindromes, despite his disappointment at the lack of taco cats. He saw a carton of UFO tofu, and a drink labeled “murder for a jar of red rum,” perhaps the less fortunate twin of a bloody Mary. After a quick meal, Santa called it a day; but he knew there was still much to learn.

And truly, there is. Palindromes are an interesting consequence of sequential language that’s completely pointless but nonetheless quite satisfying. After all… are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

Too bad I hid a boot.

For as long as I can remember, I have heard the timeless joke that pandas make excellent gangsters. After all, when a panda goes to a restaurant, he eats, shoots, and leaves. However, as such a bear like animal, it doesn’t make too much sense that pandas only eat vegetation, after all, how would they sustain their large form? A naive answer would be that they don’t, and while it is true that sometimes they eat fish or small animals, they are simply not adept at catching prey to eat. Rather, they catch what is much more accessible; a very strong, straight, and plentiful plant: bamboo.

Bamboo is known for its high concentrations of fiber, but low concentrations of protein, but its quantity makes up for its lack of nutrients. Pandas eat 20-30 pounds of bamboo a day, dedicating more than half of their day to eating alone. Their eating habits are so consistent that they can be used as a model for the growth habits of bamboo as a function of pressure, given that pandas prefer to eat younger and proteinaceous shoots rather than older and fibrous shoots. Tracing the movement of pandas effectively follows the path of proteinaceous bamboo.

I have another theory, however, of why pandas eat bamboo, and it’s not at all because of the abundance of their food supply, but that it’s absolutely downright the cutest thing the world has ever seen when they’re eating bamboo. Observe:

Look at the intense but carefree gaze in his eyes, his lax body language and casual smirk with bamboo in his paw and arms, all displays of his purity and innocence, his ears perked with joy. His face is calm and collected, and he appears deep in thought, idly munching on his slowly shortening stick of bamboo. It is a figure that is recognized globally, and an action that goes down in history. It’s an image of a panda in a world of bliss, year round, every day. He is a philosopher as much as he is a model, an inventor as much as an artist. 

My idea is that pandas actually have very high levels of intelligence and recognized that by eating bamboo, their cuteness levels would reach the peak of the food chain, and to set that in stone, they eat it all the time. They have this evolutionary advantage of being cute that no other culinary animal does, even humans, arguably experts in the field.

Gordon Ramsey cannot cook with the simple elegance that bamboo has, no amount of luxury French fine dining can compete with the extravagant grace of its consumption. The art of bamboo consumption has been cultivated and perfected over eons of panda evolution, and as it is now, it is the perfect representation of the artistic brain of mother nature, truly a spectacle to behold.

Mother biology is a supportive critic, as that cuteness is also biologically accurate. The dopamine that they receive from eating a stick of bamboo is similar to that of a human eating chocolate, so not only are they cuddly, charming, and cute when they eat, but they’re having the time of their lives.

To further supplement their abundance of cute, they have also adapted a very monotonic lifestyle, choosing to spend their time sleeping, eating, and playing, rather than bother themselves with work. It’s an enviable, and surprising result, particularly for a wild animal. Giant pandas don’t just survive however, they thrive, and their cuteness is arguably their greatest asset next to their size. 

Why is it that being cute is an evolutionary advantage, you might ask? It’s simple. In the wild, there are only a few things that a predator won’t attack, particularly mammals. A hungry fox will never go after a panther, purely because of their size. Similarly, predators smaller than the giant panda pose little threat, save for when they hunt in packs. When that is the case, their maternal senses are overloaded, and they are rendered physically incapable of harming the panda.

It’s because of this that, in fact, they would make horrible gangsters. Their aggression has evolved into pacificity, their mannerisms are that of a baby. They are incredibly passive animals, although when taunted, they know they have the means to fight back. No baby is born a gangster, and no panda is either, but they both are excellent at throwing tantrums.

Fortunately, no panda with a stick of bamboo is prone to anger. Scroll back up, and look again at that panda. Is that the face of a man who would attack you? Not at all. Rather, he might invite you to join in. Pandas and bamboo have worked together to form the iconic duo that continues to shake the world to this day, and will forever be the pinnacle this kingdom of cute has to offer.