This World and Me

" Funner is not a word." Or so they say. When learning a foreign language, it is common to lack the right words to express an idea directly. The solution, as my high school German teacher put it, is circumlocution—using words you do know to express the same idea indirectly. (See this old blog post  I wrote back in high school, for example.) After all, the foremost priority when using language is to be understood . Eloquence, succinctness, originality? Admirable goals, to be sure, but they are impossible to accomplish without first making sure that your interlocutor understands you. When you are lost in a country far from home, there is no way to get anywhere without being understood. That is part of why it has become a pet peeve of mine whenever someone—usually a K-12 English teacher—implies that someone should feel embarrassed or ashamed for using the words  funner  and funnest  in everyday speech on the basis that they are not actually real words. Firstly, they ar...

On the evening of May 21, 1925—exactly 100 years ago—a Japanese Akita dog named Hachiko left his home, as he always did, and walked to Shibuya Station in Tokyo to greet his owner, Hidesaburo Ueno, as he came home from work. This was a daily routine for the two of them: every day, Hachiko would meet Ueno at the train station, and every day, they would walk home together. On this day, however, Ueno would not return. He had died after suffering a stroke while at work. For the next nine years, nine months, and fifteen days, Hachiko would return to Shibuya Station every day to wait for Ueno to come home. I thought of Hachiko the moment I first listened to the song "Humansongs" by Porter Robinson. The song tells the story of a robot who, like Hachiko, waits for his human owner to return. Porter Robinson released "Humansongs" in March 2023. He described the song as a "demo", made to promote Po-uta, a Vocaloid voicebank based on the singing voice he used for his ...

A red-winged blackbird I photographed in Canmore, Alberta (near Banff) in 2023 One sunny day during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, my parents and I went on a walk in a nearby park. As we strolled on a boardwalk that went alongside the vernal pools characteristic of the wetland park we were visiting, my mother gasped as she noticed a small bird that landed on a cattail next to us. When I looked as well, I couldn't help but smile. The bird shook his jet-black feathers a bit, then cried out his distinctive call, as if he were saying, "Look at me!" The most striking feature, however, was the color of the feathers along the front edges of his wings, near what you might describe as his shoulders: they were bright red. My mom asked what kind of bird it was. "A red-winged blackbird," I replied. My mother, who was walking in front of me, turned around to smirk at me. She asked if I had just made that up. I laughed. I didn't blame her for asking that. The name ...

  Whenever I play Porter Robinson's song "Everything Goes On", my friends see that the song is a collaboration with League of Legends , and this immediately colors their impression. A piece of me dies every time this happens because you don't have to know anything about League of Legends to enjoy this song. I personally know very little about the gameplay and lore surrounding League of Legends , yet "Everything Goes On" stands among my favorite songs of all time. Despite its sparkly instrumentation and uplifting chords, "Everything Goes On" is a song about grief. The lyrics are from the perspective of someone who does not have much longer to live. The song opens with the chorus, where the singer tries to convince someone to forget about him after he is gone. The song tells a story about a time when the singer actually said the words in the chorus, and the verses flow from the singer attempting to justify those words, to later regretting the...