Songwriting is reflective by its very nature. Writing lyrics is a kind of therapy, of course. But how those lyrics are presented, the texture of the music, the sentiment of the chord changes, the choice of instruments… all of these artistic choices are part of a reflective process. Because when artists look inward, we’re sometimes confronted with stuff we’d rather not acknowledge. Other times, it’s stuff we were actually searching for, like an understanding of why we feel what we feel.

I was giving a demonstration of a piece of software that reads text aloud in various languages. To show it off, I set up a text document comprised of the same sentence but written in a number of different languages. As the software read out loud, it highlighted each individual word as it said it. Eventually it got to the Arabic section. “It reads it backward!” I shouted over the reading, to emphasize the point that the software tracked the words from right to left, instead of the usual left to right of the other languages in the document.

+++ title = “12” date = 2018 +++ There’s a common procedure at funerals to talk about the deceased’s life, and the ways in which the deceased changed the lives of others. People will give these kind of speeches, or write these kind of social media posts. Sometimes I hear these speeches and I think, these are some of the kindest words I’ve ever heard about a person. If they were alive, they would feel pretty damn special and loved.

There’s an old trope that when a man buys a new product, they completely ignore the manual and try to assemble or use the product just by intuition. I recently saw someone on Facebook post about the 25 page manual for their toothbrush. I bought a humidifier recently that came with instructions but no diagrams. The result was that I ended up frying the circuitry in the base by overfilling it (I didn’t realize where the fill line was located, and it was in an awkward place).

When I was 12, my parents got an African grey parrot. At first, we just wanted Coco to talk, because that is what we understood parrots do. So we talked to him, sang to him, whistled to him. At first he just squawked a lot, but after some time, he developed a repertoire of sounds. My dad farting, the sound of someone peeing, and eventually “here Coco bird, I love you.