icons and Shawn

Shawn looks like a cross between Kurt Cobain and Ville Valo here:


Hot goth or bar fight survivor? Not enough sleep or rocking guy-liner? Not sure, but it's a bad ass pic.

So is this one:


I've been wanting to switch out our user photos on the Adzuki Bean Stash Mp3 blog for some time and these were images he took with his iBook a while ago. Following his lead I then took a series of web cam stills with my own iBook:






I must say though, Shawn looks a heck of a lot better than me in headphones. Instead of looking like cool and legit recording artist, I look like a kid with a MacBook recording shit in the bathroom (which is precisely what I am). You'll have to traipse on over to the blog itself to see which pic I chose.


But enough of me. I'm devoting the rest of this post to one of my closest and oldest friends who happened to turn 31 a couple of days ago.

There he is to the left in his glorious graduate school pic. For whatever reason the Old Navy T cracks me up. It's just so not him. Unfortunately, you can't see his dark blue eyes in the photo, but look at the lovely nose of his... people pay money for a nose like that. Anyhow, I digress...

It's a misconception that I met Shawn back in grad school. We actually knew each other during undergraduate studies where both of us were math majors at the University of Texas at Austin and shared a Topology class together back 1998. What made the class special was that it was taught Moore-Method style where us hopefuls were given a handful of axioms and then with minimum guidance from the professor would be expected to solve theorems from scratch on the board each lecture. One of the best classes ever and to this day I probably retained the most from Topology I.

It functioned on the whole "learning through trauma" principle where one tends to remember things they've struggled through. Moore Methodology totally feeds on the stereotypical insecurities of die-hard mathematicians and their need to outsmart one another which in of itself creates maintainable trauma due to the competitive nature of the classroom. Hrm, I'm getting a bit philosophical here, so compare it to getting stripped naked in front of your classmates and made to do the chicken dance, but with the odd sense of euphoria injected at the end of your bought with humiliation...I suppose if you're kinky there's no difference between the two situations, but you get the point. Anyway, with the way class was structured, math talent and general intelligence levels were blatantly apparent and the very first thing that I noticed about Shawn was that he was definitely one of the sharpest students in the class. Nothing could phase him. He could prove these problems in his sleep.

From there, I can't quite remember how or why we stuck together for so long. I'm sure mix tapes had something to do with it as well as the common obsession for all things Nine Inch Nails and Trent related (Nine Inch Nails problem sets were a common theme in our math handouts when we were TAs. I also still have the Trent Reznor sack puppet Shawn made me). Maybe it was because I thought his "Bruce the Shark" videos were cool. We shared a love of music, visual arts, macabre, of course mathematics and let's not forget that both of us always seemed to be chronically depressed all the time.

I can tell you that the more I got to know him, the more I came to understand the term polymath.

Over the years we have given each other a gazillion reasons not to ever speak to each other again and managed long stretches of time where we both truly utterly hated one another, and yet our camaraderie has always managed to mend itself and become something that's much more profound and loyal than most of my other friendships with people. We're super blunt with one another. We've exchanged nights where we've cried for the other person. We divulge secrets and insecurities that no one else is privy to. However, we've never slept together, never "gone out" or dated because we both realize that we're too similar for any romantic path to ever work out. Crossing the carnal bound destroys the beauty of this unconditional devotion we share, but realistically the real reason is that we'd drive each other mad and probably murder each other or commit joint suicide.

With all that said, if you ask either one of us, "Do you love each other?" the answer is a completely effortless "yes."

So, happy birthday, Mr. Soon-to-be Dr. Shawn Westmoreland. Oh yeah, and please work on that "Fire Exit" demo because it's fucking long overdue, damnit!