What to do about the Magic Flute?

Apparently, Kenneth Branagh directed a beautiful movie version of the Magic Flute that came out in 2006. I found this out recently, because I’d had Bergman’s Magic Flute in my Netflix DVD queue and, through some technical error on Netflix behalf, it became Branagh’s Magic Flute (and available for streaming!)

Branagh’s version of the opera is set in WWI—the dragon pursuing Tamino is chlorine gas, the three ladies are nurses, the Queen of the Night shows up on a tank and Sarastro is running a refugee camp. It’s beautiful—as well acted as possible with such a ridiculous libretto and well sung. But the story is still racist, classist and sexist.

Manastatos is evil just because his skin is black. The queen and her ladies are evil simply because they’re ladies--not gentlemen. Sarastro has kidnapped Pamina, the queen’s daughter to save her from her mother. Papageno is cowardly and fails all his trials because he’s the comic servant. No one points out the fact that he’s the one who got into Sarastro’s palace and saved Pamina from the (equally cowardly) Manastatos while Tamino was playing around with the three spirits.

In act two, as part of the men’s trials Pamina can see Tamino, but he may not speak to her. This wouldn’t be so bad if someone had told Pamina about this in the first place. But, as she has not been informed that this is part of the plan, she runs off to kill herself because Tamino no longer loves her.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to notice these things. There are other plot problems as well.  For example, all the choruses to songs seem to be trite sayings such as  “A man whose spirit is not weak will weigh his words before he speaks. For some reason the “isms” bother me more than the trite lyrics*

And in spite of all of these things, I love Mozart’s last opera. Not just for the music—for the dragon, the birdman, the magic flute and glockenspiel and the queen of the night. As my dad said when I discussed this with him recently—“It’s a Star Wars kind of Opera” and I’m a Syfy and Fantasy kind of girl.

The theatre group my dad was involved with when I was a kid put on a production of the Magic Flute. I got to be a dancing savage beast. At the time I loved the fact that I got to watch most of the opera again and again as much as the fact that I got to appear in it. Am I syfy geek because I saw the Magic Flute at an impressionable age, or did I love it so because I would one day be a geek? Who knows? I do remember that even though I was only in 2^nd(?) or 3^rd (grade) I noticed the sexism of the piece—Man=good. Woman=Bad.

And, yes, I know that literature and art are the products of the culture of the time and that 18^th century Vienna was probably not a particularly enlightened place by the standards of 2014. It would also be wrong to change the story to be less sexist/classist/racist.

So why do we continue to watch this opera? It’s probably mostly because the music is beautiful but that’s not it entirely. With all its flaws it’s still a good story—the same way that Star Wars is still a good story.

*The opera is in German, which I don’t speak. But I’ve seen several translations and in all of them suffer from this problem so I blame the librettist Schikaneder the librettist and not the translators.

Memorial Day weekend 2014

It is Memorial Day. I'm sitting on the back porch and looking at my yard. My dog Hawkeye is sitting next to me.

Mom and Dad came up for the weekend to spend time with me and my boyfriend and to meet my dog. Mom and Dad had met Christian, my boyfriend, at Christmas and seemed to get along with him. But that was a brief period (and half of my family was sick with the flu) so I was glad for them to come up and spend more time with him and me.

They had not met Hawkeye before, and while he's a sweet friendly lab (and the dog we had growing up was an undemonstrative doberman) I wasn't sure how this was going to go--would Mom object to being jumped on? I shouldn't have worried. Whether because Hawkeye is a "Charmeh" or because they have mellowed in their old age they both loved him.

It was a very fun weekend--but tiring. I'm glad (for now) to be at home with the dog and no one else. We went to Gloucester, we went to Home Depot, we ate seafood, we walked the dog--and we gardened!

I don't know why--maybe I've learned that life's too short to worry about this kind of thing--but I felt at home with Christian and my parents this weekend. It's true not everybody knew all the same stories--but that was okay. Well known stories were retold with relish (a new audience!)--How my Uncle Kent had decided in the middle of Thanksgiving Dinner that my parents' large mirror was going to fall out of its frame and they needed to move it this instant (!) how the couple "3 years older than G_d" could not remember what to order in Wendy's, etc.

We did lots of things that I do most weekends--go to the shoe store in Gloucester and the bookstore in Gloucester--but this time with parents. There's always something fun about that--going to the stores where they know me and saying "well, this time I've brought my Dad."

Today was the best day this weekend though. I invited my parents to my place for breakfast--I had bought eggs and potatoes and ham steak to feed them. I wanted to cook for them and this was a low pressure way to do so (it's hard to screw up breakfast.) They came over and we gave them coffee while we finished cooking. Dad decided we should eat outdoors, so he and I cleared a table off and set chairs up.

We had a tasty breakfast and then Mom and I walked Hawkeye while Dad and Christian went back to Home Depot to replace a part he'd bought for the toilet. Christian had a list of things he planned to do around the house today. He calls this list his "Honey Do" list, but while I do make a few requests, the list is mostly comprised of things he has decided need doing to my house (we need a dehumidifier?) The list included planting all the tomato plants as well as all the herb plants we bought at Home Depot this weekend.

As Mom and I sat on the back porch drinking seltzer after walking the dog, she said "You know, if Christian is going to plant, we should weed first.  I can start weeding--but I don't want to do that in these pants." I lent Mom a pair of pants, and before I knew it she had graduated from weeding to planting. Dad and Christian got back from Home Depot, and Dad insisted on putting a plate on the light switch in the downstairs bathroom (he bought one for this.) I asked Dad to bring the lawnmower up from the basement (meaning to ply it myself) and then went upstairs to move laundry to the dryer. I came back downstairs because Hawkeye was barking--why were Christian, Mom and Dad letting him bark?  Because he was barking at my (non-motorized) lawn mower.  Not just barking at--attacking the tires! Perhaps (said Dad) he's alarmed because it is a creature from the basement (which he is not allowed to visit.)

Mom and Dad not only planted all my tomato plants and helped week/mow my back yard but Dad also trimmed back the dead parts of my Hydrangea--all while Christian fixed various pieces of plumbing and I ran around between parties looking for this and that, offering fertilizer, garbage bags, beer, seltzer or tools.

Mom and Dad and I drove Christian to the airport. Then I had dinner with Mom and Dad. Returned to my own house, I pick up their coffee cups and water glasses and put them in the dish washer. I sit and look at my back yard and the work they have done there and feel loved.

So..Your Parents Let You Get a Degree in French Literature II

I've already told this story several times verbally so I don't know how smoothly it will come out in writing--it may be a bit stale. In fact, I'm writing it up because I told this story three times in the past few weeks.

I will occasionally be asked by friends (usually engineers) why my parents let me major in French instead of "something practical." One of my friends went so far as to tell me about the conversation his parents had with him and his sibling about how they were happy to pay for education, but it needed to be in something useful.

After college--after I came back from France--I spent years running around crashing into walls/flailing because I didn't know what to do with myself professionally.  For a while I was a bit mad at Carleton for not insisting that everyone take a course in (say) Accounting, or something equally practical along with insisting that we learn how to swim, pass a writing requirement and take a course on the Recognition and Affirmation of Difference. I mention this because it would have been nice to have a straighter path between college graduation and happy/useful employment.

On the other hand, from the year and a half or so I spent in business school, it's pretty obvious to me that I couldn't have gone to a school that had a "business" major. It would have killed me/bored me to tears. And I loved French Lit--I never got As because I had a terrible work ethic--but I loved it.

Earlier this year I needed to meet with a rep from a software company my employers work with. I had expected this to be a boring sales call. The rep (let's call her Toni) showed up in my office, we called my boss (who worked in an office in another state) and the three of us discussed general "state of our two companies relationship" stuff for about 45 minutes at which point my boss said he was all done and left us alone. I spent the next 3 hours or so with Toni talking about all the cool stuff her company's software could do. It was awesome!

We got lunch and talked about more general matters. Toni's company is located in Toronto and she is Canadian. We talked about our undergraduate educations--it turns out that she majored in French too! (Although I gather this was more of a pedagogical degree than mine was.) She had done several other things (including having a career in fencing) before starting to work for the software company--first as a geek and now as a relationship manager.

Somewhere during the conversation I realized that here we were--two former French majors working as geeks for successful businesses.  Was the path as straight forward as that of Babson alums who went on to work as Business Analysts? No.

What's the moral of this story? It takes all kinds? Verbals make good geeks too? Smart people can pick skills up and reinvent themselves? Language geeks can be good at SQL too? I don't know.

keeper--Neil Young Change Your Mind

Labor Day 2013

When I talked to my sister on my birthday she said she couldn't come up to Beverly this year, which was not a surprise--we were almost out of Summer. I told her I wouldn't be down to New York for Labor Day because I hadn't bought a ticket yet and I was afraid it would be wicked expensive. She said "I'll buy you a ticket."

This is how I ended up in New York City for Labor Day weekend for the first time in 4 years. I bought my own ticket down to New York, but the fact that my sister said she'd buy me a ticket showed me that she really wanted to see *me*--not just come up to Beverly because we have the beach.

I  told my parents that I'd be down to see them in less than two weeks and they seemed happy "You'll be staying in guest room #4" my dad said.

My parents have a big Labor Day party every year because they moved in on Labor Day weekend. They make their own ice cream and have one last barbecue for the summer. Since my dad became the Braumeister for church beer club they serve dad's home brew as well. They invite their neighbors and their church friends.

Other than visiting for the birth of Giovanni and Brian, I have not been down to New York any time other than Christmas, so at the party I found myself speaking with people I hadn't talked to in 4 years (or longer.) I had to reintroduce myself and give my elevator speech. "I'm-Jack-and-Barbara's-older-daughter-that-lives-in-Boston-and-does-IT-for-a-fee-only-wealth-management-firm.
"Yes--I work with wonderful people! Yes, our office is right by where-the-bombing-was.
"I bought a house in Beverly--how weird is that--I live in my Mom's home town! No, I will *not* be back for the Stuyvesant High School reunion this fall."

I admit, I found it draining. At one point in the evening I got my sister's third kid--Giovy--to sit on my lap. I just held him (he was shy and not up to all the people.) I joked with my sister that the introverts were over here in the corner*.

On the other hand, the experience taught me a few things. For example at one point my parents pastor spoke with me. I was glad to talk with her, because I had heard a great deal of good things about her. She asked if I had "a family" back in MA. I knew she meant "Are you married with kids?" so I said no--but I felt a little silly doing so. No--I don't have offspring and there are no rings on my left hand but I have my pack and yeah--they kind of are "family." If I smell gas in the house I call them. If my toilet develops a personality I'm going to call them. If their computers start acting up they know they can call me. Likewise if they need dogsitters. It's not as simple as a nuclear family.

The morning after the party I came to a realization. I was texting someone about what I did at the party and it hit me--I had been playing the part of Jack and Barbara's successful daughter, but most of what I'd said to people was actually true. I do have good friends. I do own a house. I do have a Master's Degree in IT and I do like most of the people I work with. All of these things are true, so...maybe I am Jack and Barbara's successful older daughter who lives north of Boston?

Another thing that occurred to me was that the last time I'd been down to a Labor Day party was in 2009. At that point in time I'd been dumped by my boyfriend of 9 years. I was broke-down--whatever any of these people saw of me was not my best face. I was being evicted from my Cambridge life and I was scared and depressed. I had not yet decided to move to Beverly.

It's 4 years later. I moved to Beverly and stayed here. I own a house. I have awesome friends (and their dogs) I have a Master's Degree in IT. Bonus added--there's this cute boy I'm seeing. No one who met met me this year could possibly mistake me for the miserable, shell shocked creature I was in 2009--the last time I went to my parents' Labor Day party.



*Later in the evening Giovy was high on refined sugar and mooning the guests. I admit I picked him up and kissed him and called him a little punk. Before his mom hauled him off I got him to say "I am the Lizard King."

Now What?

I'm officially done with graduate school. I have a master's degree in information technology. Yay me! Now that I'm no longer spending my Saturday afternoons reading RFCs and writing papers about them what will I do with myself?

Most people seem to find my off the cuff responses (learn Perl for real, read more history books, clean my house) unacceptable.

It has been apparent to me for a while that my existence is very... routine. I need to be home by a certain hour on Sundays to relax so that I can do Monday.  I re-watch the same movies and read the same books--last week when I was picking airplane reading for a trip I took I didn't include a single book I hadn't read. I don't as a rule go on trips--I go to NJ for business and I go to NY when I am obliged to for my family.

And yes I know--I work hard--I work hard at school and so I don't require myself to do anything hard or anything uncomfortable outside of school or work (or even in school or work if it can be avoided.) Outside of work or school, I have not met any new humans in a long time and I never hang out with anyone I don't know well enough to lend my car to (if I had a car, that is.) I haven't done anything outside of my comfort zone in a long time and my comfort zone is not very big.

This sort of behavior has consequences though. I went out with one of my study--buddies for a beer after my last class ever (!) and I realized I had nothing to say for myself. When did I become such a boring person?

In the past ten years I've been afraid to try new things (apply to graduate school, learn SSRS, go to a new hair dresser etc.) or even talk to new people at parties because I've been depressed or exhausted but those excuses don't apply anymore. I don't feel depressed. I'm done with school and while my employer works me hard I am entitled to vacation time.

So here is my done with grad school resolution (Summer Solstice Resolution?)--at least once a week I will do something that's outside of my comfort zone. It shouldn't be too hard to find things to do that qualify.  I decided to start by making a list of single acts (make a dentist's appointment, suggest a new project to my boss, sign up for a yoga class etc.) that would qualify as "out of my comfort zone." Even that is hard. It's as if my imagination has atrophied. I feel like Strong Bad when his imagination's busted. (That alone tells you all--Homestarrunner.com hasn't put up Strong Bad a cartoon since 2009.)

This is what happens when your existence becomes too passive. I need to do something about this.

The Trouble with Data Mining

I don’t know what the right way to go about this would have been, but the way the professor chose was definitely one of the wrong ones.

The class was data mining. It’s my second to last class in the MSIT program and it’s the first one that has required any coding. The syllabus for the class said that programming experience was a prerequisite but it is not the first syllabus in our course of study to say this. To us it doesn’t really matter what the prerequisites are—we take the courses as they happen. It’s not as if, knowing the prerequisites for this course, any of us would eschew the class (which won’t come around for another 6 months to a year) so that we could take an intro to programming at a community college.

Having prerequisites outside the programs course of study is impractical—like having Wonderland Station on the Blue Line as a prerequisite to get off at Harvard Square on the Red Line*. Which is not to say that the professor was wrong to expect graduate students in an IT program would be able to write programs—just that he went about it the wrong way.

Our data mining professor is a tall, cheerful Indian man of about my age (perhaps he is younger). He is teaching many courses concurrently and so asked us to set the course title in the subject line of any e-mail we sent him. On the first night he asked a version of the standard MSIT professor’s questions of us all—What’s your name, where do you work, what did you get your undergrad degree in and what is your programming language experience?

A third of us (including me) have had no programming experience within the last decade (or none at all.) In spite of this, the professor insisted that programming was an important part of data mining and so we would all have to learn a programming language. On the spur of the moment he decided we should all learn Perl. He recommended getting the O’Reilly books.

Our classes are 6 weeks long—5 weeks really, since there is usually a Monday holiday during any given 6 week period. The idea of learning a programming language along with the course material (which was rather-math heavy) was daunting. At the second class the professor announced that he was giving us a homework assignment to work on over the next few weeks including a few Perl programs we would have to write. The third week of class was the week of Marathon day so there would be no class. I could fit all the Perl he'd taught us by the end of the second week on my thumb nail.

I spent most of the 2013 Marathon weekend trying to learn Perl. To do the homework we had to install Perl/Perl DBI and get them to work (or work on a command line Linux server in the cloud) and then write Perl scripts that would get a bunch of data from a CSV into a SQL database and then pull it out again and report statistics on it (max, min StDev etc.) The second of the two programs was supposed to draw a graph of the data.

This seemed impossible. And that was depressing. This was a graduate level course. I am a professional geek—shouldn’t I be able to rise to this challenge? Haven’t I faced more daunting tasks—situations where I had no idea how to get from A to B and somehow succeeded anyways? Both professionally and academically?  Maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. Didn’t I want to learn Perl and Perl DBI? Of course I did! So what was I complaining about?

Worse, my study-buddy sent me e-mail the Saturday after the professor gave us the assignment entitled “Don’t procrastinate on the homework.” Shit oh dear. He’d already spent 7 hours on the programming portion and wasn’t done. I had progressed from “Hello World!” to a few simple scripts that did math —but nothing that approached the complexity of the homework assignment. It if took this guy 7 hours I was toast. And if I was toast, what was the rest of the class—that dry piece of bread that caught fire when I stuck it in the microwave?

I admit I was enjoying working my way through the first few chapters of the O'Reilly Perl book, but I felt like I was playing around in the shallow end of the pool and I was not sure I was going to be able to swim in the deep end by next weekend.  There was only one problem in the problem set that involved Perl. I think in the end some of my colleagues gave up and just didn’t do that problem. I never considered that option because I figured this was not the last Perl problem we were going to be assigned. Also, there was my pride. 

It became apparent that most of my cohort had not started the homework on the first weekend—or at any rate hadn’t considered the Perl portion last weekend. E-mail about how hard this was flew back and forth from all members of the cohort. Finally the professor sent out a note reiterating “given that we are in an IT Program, and in a Data Mining course, it is reasonable to expect that we will implement Data Mining in code.”  And “Inevitably, some students will end up having a hard time, others will have an easy time, and some will find it to be just right.” I found this statement to be callous. I don't think he had any idea how hard we were finding it to make our way into the problem set he had assigned us. 

But the real show stopper was that he had cleared all of this with the dean. This meant that none of us could appeal to said dean about the difficulty of the homework. 

My problem with the data mining professor was that he decided we should all go off and learn a language on our own—and then do all the data mining coursework involved. I will admit that the Endicott program has spoon-fed the MSIT cohort to a certain extent, so it took me a while to decide if I was upset because this professor was asking something unreasonable or if I was upset because he was asking us to just work a little harder than normal. I decided he was asking us to do something unreasonable (given the 6 week course length.)

I e-mailed the dean and told him that in my opinion, if the MSIT students were expected to program it would be helpful if the course of study included a class in programming.

The dean responded by saying that the last time he had tried that the course had been a disaster. I mentioned this to a study buddy of mine who pointed out that it would be ridiculous to have a $17XX course teaching what anyone could pick up at a community college for $3XX—how much programming can you teach in 6 weeks anyways?  I admitted he had a point, but what is the right solution then—warn MSIT applicants that they will be required to code?

Meanwhile I miraculously found my way into the homework assignments. With a lot of luck (and a while loop that the professor gave me) I went from staring at Perl forums online and whimpering to writing two programs that compiled and ran. They didn't do everything they were supposed to do and they were not elegant, but they moved me from the side of people who couldn't figure the assignment out to the side of people who could. Suddenly I didn't hate the professor so much.

Meanwhile the professor had grasped that he was asking us to do something a little out of the ordinary. He  offered a tutorial before class—starting at 4:30. Most of us were there for it. He then spent most of the class teaching Perl—which was great except that we didn’t learn any data mining. 

In the parking lot after class some of us discussed the situation. We felt a little bad for the professor, but most of our sympathy was reserved for ourselves.  “You can’t just read Perl code to people after 9 PM and expect them to get anything out of it.” I opined.

“Remember what the dean said about the last time they included a programming course?”
 “It was a disaster!” we all said in chorus.  

Over the course of the next week it became clear that we had convinced our Data Mining professor that we really couldn’t write Perl code (or at least that he was not the man to teach it to us.) The professor sent out grades for the Perl assignment (graded on a very lenient curve) and a new assignment with no Perl in it. He also sent out a final project assignment—a research paper on data mining (initially it was supposed to involve getting a data set and doing some data mining).  We had broken his spirit. I am sorry anyone had to get his/her spirit broken but better him than us.