warm fuzzy feeling

i've always been thrilled by images of snow falling somewhere (let's take rockefeller square for a start), or maccaulay culkin sitting in the church hiding from bad guys, lost in a foreign city and watching the choir do carols in a church. i wanted that warm fuzzy feeling.

so i went to the christmas concert by held by LSE at St Clement's Danes. That's the RAF church on the Strand just opposite in the little island in between the Aldwych traffic. It's so close it feels like our church, but it's really the RAF's. You can tell because there's statues of Arthur Harris (wasn't he the guy who came up with firebombing Dresden? Ok I guess I shouldn't judge, it was a difficult time in difficult circumstances) and Gladstone. Oh everyone loves Gladstone for being such a good prime minister. They always worship him in my history readings.

We have a good choir and orchestra, and they did nice pieces like Ne Timeas Maria, excerpts from Handel's Messiah (yes, Hallelujah!), and I was reminded of how different in tone the old testament is from the new, and how revelations was probably the only one similar in grandeur (different message i guess). I thought I would die of emotion looking at the huge christmas tree and thinking about spending a cold lonely winter in a foreign land (sure.)

but then they did mendelssohn's violin concerto which was honestly so moving because they had a good violinist for one who had proper facial expressions, and he looked really natural. plus, the violin is such a nifty instrument. it can go from very happy to very sad.

ended with beethoven, symphony no. 8. anyway, i headed back with miguel and i learnt how to say "sonofabitch" in spanish! finally. spanish practical usage. true to form, i am the rain man. after some major event going back from lse you can expect it to rain on me. cold. so cold. by the way, miguel was the person who claimed god was on lsd, and i could just see that his mind was wandering during the religious parts of the ceremony, and true enough, he told me he was figuring out indifference curves again. this man thinks indifference curves for everything. pretty women, short women, he has them going northeast and southwest, thinks whether something is a bijection or not. at the same time he likes latin music and as we were in subway listening to the dance song they play at every club nowadays he told me it means "gasoil, gasoil". what? "gazoy, gazoy?" what does that mean in spanish? no "gasoil, petrol, petrol". that's really dumb i said. why are we dancing to the lamentations of a car mechanic?

and on the way back we continued our discussion on what was interesting in mathematics. no, not why did god pick 3 (theology is the lack of faith, so said popper), but he said he was "risk-taker" so he wanted to do courses in pure probability, not the fuddy-duddy ones offered in dept of statistics. ok. and topology, and real analysis, and etc... and going to nepal to work. cool. interesting. i didn't have the heart to tell him i like argentinian soccer but i had just studied argentina's multiple debt failures. but he was the closest i got to honesty today. which was refreshing=). i suspect he would try to find some subject starting with D so that he could call LSE the LSD instead. he's funny like that.