C (age 16): Read it now! It’s much better.
J (age 17): Are you still working on the same story?
C: Yeah. I made it better.
J: Just leave it alone and come hang out.
C: I can’t.
J: You can’t?
C: No. I can’t. I’m on a quest.
J: A quest!
C: A quest for est!
J: What kind of quest is that?
C: I want to do the b-est! And be the smart-est!
J: And the lame-est?
C: Dude.
J: You’ll be the smart-est! And the lame-est! And that’s how it goes!
C: It’s not lame.
J: I didn’t call it lame. I called you lame.
C: I’m not lame.
J: Then you better rename your quest.

My mom recently handed me all of my childhood memorabilia in a box. Inside the box, and undated letter on a sheet of lined yellow paper from a legal pad:

 Dear Ms. Santa,

As you know I am a wonderful child and have been considrably *good. For Christmas this year I have carefully selected the most usfull items if your name is Celeste and you live on Murano Road. 

I made a picture for you and left you some cookies. Merry Christmas!

 *Howevere, spelling is not my strog point.

I have decided I am going to start all of my talks from now on with the same line: “As you know, I am a wonderful cognitive scientist…”

… so I’ve become very flakey at updating this blog. So I’m pausing for a second to explain. I moved to Rochester for graduate school one year ago, and I love it, but I’m sort of absorbed in starting all of my research… and maybe don’t have a lot to report aside from that! And my research, I talk about on my work site, and, even there, only in rough detail infrequently.

So I’m not sure what to do with the blog. I don’t have the energy or gaul to report on my shoes and haircuts anymore. Recounting book plots and quotes… slightly less myopic, but, no, not really. Not sure to what degree I can openly talk about my research… or to what degree it’s smart to. I could keep complaining about ads and politics, and keep posting overheard conversations…

I’m not sure what I want to do. I don’t have the time to revert back to blogging about robots, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, which is a lot of what I talked about in the beginning.

This blog is read primarily by strangers, but also friends and family… I’m not sure why anyone reads it, I guess, or if that should influence what I put here. If I were to blog for the sake of blogging, I’d post pictures and lists of things and, occasionally, rants. That might be the direction things are going.

Would that be terrible? I’m not even going to edit this post, because it’s that kind of day.

I’m feeling under the weather and still working while everyone else sleeps… but guess what? DJ Shadow’s right there with me. Rock.

I’ll be back tomorrow.

So, I haven’t had a party in a long time, cause I’ve been working or something like that, but I was thinking maybe a crawfish boil the first weekend in May would be fun. Would anyone be up for that? Mail ordering live crawfish from Louisiana would be about $10 per person. I’d cook the crawfish, cover beer, maybe make some other things. (Like maybe we could do burgers and things like that for people who don’t want to pinch tails and suck heads.) By May, hopefully it’d be warm enough to do it outside! Whatdayasay, Rochestarians?