The Sun Shines West on My Mark

Listening to shuffled music on BART

November 10, 2011

BART has its destination planned for me and everyone else, where everyone and I didn't need to move in order to drift to our destination, rather the train makes planned stops only this 710 foot snake can.[1] Whenever I get on the train, I usually take the end cars, which are either the A2, C1, or C2 vehicles. They're the cars that likely have the hard ground floors and visually appealing seats compared to the ones with the black streaks on the top of the seats. They are also the vehicles that operate as leader and trail cars, however the way the consist is in or outbound.

On this commute, I prepared my experiment and journey by putting on my headphones without starting the music player. I recorded a portion of my journey, although I didn't actually record the whole trip because recording time was limited, including battery life, I started recording when I was coming up to the Pleasant Hill BART station and going from thereon. I recorded the video with my Black Flip UltraHD video camera and in order to get the audio, I placed the left side of my headphone onto the microphone receiver, giving some feedback on what I'm currently listening to. In theory, I thought the microphone would perfectly pick up what's being outputted in the headphones and nothing else. Stupid me, the amplitude is much higher and expanded than my headphones.

The first song is an intelligible titled song, as punctuations translated the Japanese characters that the computer from the movie soundtrack to Ponyo. As the first song began, I pressed the shuffle button, leading to the random play of other songs. An audiobook of David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System comes next. Out of lite bewilderment, I forgot that the majority of the music I put in my smartphone is filled with the whole DFW audiobook. It's rewarding to hear the book, but not in this particular fashion. I stopped recording, but I kept the audio playing, hoping to hear an actual song, but I was pretty disappointed in not making an appropriate playlist excluding non-music audio.

I'm starting to love riding the BART train every chance I get because it helps me relax and think before I go out in the world, where I begin my daily regimen of school lectures, buying lunch with whatever money I have in my wallet, walking around campus, drifting, or just relaxing in the lounge, especially when no one is taking space on the couch[2]. I thank Yellow BART Snake whenever I get off at Daly City, knowing that I'll be traveling with Mr. Snake back to where I start my commute every morning[3].

Marking my Territory
Another mini-experiment I took on was to mark my territory everywhere I walked for every minute that passed. The basic premise is that I walked around a certain location, (this time, it was around the SF campus) and for every minute that passed, I would write the time, with chalk on the outside pavement (or anything writable on chalk). One exception where I didn't write was when I was inside the building or near by the side of them. I didn't want to vandalize buildings that was owned by the state. And as for the last project, I simply did not want to get caught, basically going incognito in a public environment, which is certainly why some minutes I skipped through.

I had no principle in direction, but rather it was the familiarity of my surroundings and the playfulness of tagging your mark with the box of colorful chalk I had in my left hand and pulling my phone out of my right rocket to check whether a minute has passed.
Michael was here at 12:53, this is where I started drifting around the campus.
M was here at 12:54, I started to walk down the stairs, leading to the Humanities building.
Michael was here at 12:55, I walked up towards the path of the Humanities building.
Michael was here at 12:56Michael was here at 12:57, the ground didn't seem to be writable with my chalk, so I wrote on the bench instead. It was petty tough to write the letters as fast as possible. I believe it took me an estimated 55 seconds before another minute passed. As my hands became more chalkier, the screen as well.12:58, as I finished writing on the bench at 12:57, another minute passed by, so I immediately wrote to the nearest concrete ground that looked writable.Michael was here at 12:59; I had an urge to walk up the long concrete stairs leading to the exits of the third floor, but I also knew there would be writable walls on the side of the stairs. Now I skipped two minutes because I was in the Student Union, finding my way out and hopefully finding a seclusive spot to write the next time, which can be seen below. Michael was here at 1:02; I always came to this spot hidden behind trees and bushes that's near the GYM and right across the ATM machines. This area includes a water/bird? fountain, carved wooden benches without removing its bark, and a chair that looks fit for a king. Michael was here at 1:03
Michael stops at 1:06 :). Now the fun part started where I traced all of my marks, starting from the 1:05 mark and going backwards to the start. It felt like a scavenger hunt, trying to remember back my past footsteps.

And a little bonus...

I honestly had no idea what I was going to do after I drew what is now a grid. Something in my mind wondered if this looks like a game of 5x5 Tic-Tac-Toe or Dots and Boxes, which unfortunately, should not have its lines drawn. Maybe I'm used to seeing the checkerboard pattern whenever I enter one of the school buildings and I tend to think I'm playing the horse in chess, making 'L' patterns whenever I'm walking over the tiles.

Something in me always wanted to skip and hop on tile flooring, especially ones designed to form check board patterns. For many years, I've always been conscious of never stepping on the cracks of pavements because I feel like the cracks will open up and eat me alive; only to bring myself back to reality, that I'm walking on nothing else than concrete, nothing is going to eat me alive, and the only thing I need to worry about is finding time to think about how to present my work orally.

Footnotes:

[1] - This is according to Wikipedia, where the longest BART trains stretches to 710 feet on the 700 foot platform(s), giving people seconds to welcome themselves into the void of empty seats that one can choose to sit or to a plethora of the deadpan to sleepy faces of rush hour morning, filling most of the seating and you, the commuter have to find a seat before you have to suffer the consequences of standing for almost an hour, while you try to hold onto railing that you can't reach for an hour's sake until the Embarcadero station comes and the masses of East Bay commuters trample on the streets of downtown San Francisco. I just lay in wait, until its my turn to stomp on San Francisco concrete, as my shoes nap on the hard ground or soft, yet dirty-looking carpet and wake up when I get up.

[2] - Thank goodness there's a couch in the CIA lounge. It's nice that I can walk in, simply crash and take a quick nap if I only slept for three or four hours in bed or an hour, when I rarely sleep on the floor in my computer room because I'm procrastinating on my essay. I'm hoping this won't happen again when I do my final essay for this class.

[3] - Although the train is not yellow nor it's not an actual snake as I like to NOT imagine,. It's that I associate the trains in-name-only due to the BART maps showing the Pittsburg/Bay Point line being that color. If you check the map with the colorful lines connecting and bending around cities and towns densely populated above this footnote, it's the trail that snakes go back and forth to pick up and drop off people.

As for giving the train a personal name (Yellow BART Snake), it's just a pun of identifying intimate objects as people. Yellow being the first name, BART is the middle, and Snake is its last name. I might even go a bit far as to say that they are like my transitional objects, or security blankets whenever I come to the drudgery of what is commuting to the shuttle or bus in order to get on campus. I'm glad that commuters can at least get comfortable to experience the trauma of commuting to work and doing what is essentially nothing pleasing in your own blue/white collar jobs, something I will have to face when I graduate school.