How to Drive on Unplowed, Narrow, One-Way Cambridge Streets; Or, An Exercise in Skidding Tastefully

I had a 3pm appointment to get to in Brookline yesterday, and it was snowing. Powdery, packing-snow, and some four inches had fallen throughout the morning. The City of Cambridge, personified, was offstage wringing his hands, spotlight-shy, fretting over his entrance. No plow to scrape the asphalt streets, no salt to melt the slush-mire. Through this I drove my trusty Corolla, tentative at first. All cars on the road (actually cars and not trucks, vans or SUVs: this is Cambridge) were struggling, 20 mph tops and fishtailing periodically as they hit particularly powdery, slushy bits of unplowed road. [A note from a Buffalo native: 4 inches is not a lot of snow. And yet, road conditions were legitimately treacherous, because none of those four inches had been removed from the streets.] I've been paying a bit more attention lately to doing things properly: Downton Abbey has of course inflamed nascent passions for ascots and stickpins, and I've finally broadened my collection of garishly-colored argyle socks to include tasteful colors, such as lilac. When a little depressed last Tuesday night, I set about cheering myself up by polishing up a pair of wingtip brogues and practicing a flawless full Windsor knot. So as I made my way down Garden St., skidding periodically, it occurred to me that this, too, could be done properly.

Notes on skidding well:

-Foremost, it is rude to swerve into oncoming traffic. One ought to exercise caution in one's right turns. 

-When driving down narrow, winding, unplowed one-way streets with moderately expensive cars parked on either side of you, the asshole behind you honking his horn can go fuck himself.

-Turn on your headlights in daytime. This is primarily a courtesy to other drivers, as it helps to distinguish your car (moving! or intending to move when not stuck!) from cars that are parked or stranded, or when visibility is poor, from snowy expanses of empty road.

-Anticipate stops and turns. Start braking for stops earlier than in non-snowdrift conditions, as your stopping distance increases unexpectedly when tires lose traction. If possible, approach turns at a low speed and maintain that speed throughout the endeavor, so that you are neither braking nor accelerating into the turn.

-Do not forget the pedestrians. They are still out there, walking, and it is more miserable for them in this weather than it is for you.

That's the extent of my meditation on snow-driving, so here's wishing everyone a good Sunday.

-R.

I Resent the Intimation That It's Already Fall

It's August, still, but just barely. The mood shifted in my absence, of its own accord, without my assent. Languid late summer gave way to that energetic crackle of the-week-before-classes-start, and I am dimly aware that I ought to buy pencils. The undergraduates are moving in, setting up their dorm rooms, excited for a new semester. I returned to Cambridge to find things pretty much as they were all summer: warm breeze through the window, feet up on the couch, fudgesicles in the freezer. Whatever shift occurred on campus this past week, it left our apartment untouched. Do I forge ahead into the fall semester?  In mood and thought I am still immersed in that easy absence of nervous excitement inherent to summer; there's just a little bit of it left, and shouldn't I do that little bit justice? I'm certain that I'll emerge from this happy summer indolence, make the shift, but it's all too early now. Classes begin August 31st -- appalling -- this year. I think I'll catch up once it's properly September.

In other news, I can't hear anything. I caught a cold while on the Hawaii field trip, and the congestion is awful. My poor little eardrums have been through a cruel Hawaiian altitude wringer -- Kilauea, sea level, Mauna Loa! sea level, Kilauea, sea level, Mauna Kea! sea level etc. etc. repeat. And then I got on an airplane. My ears still haven't popped, and everything sounds dim, distant. Oddly this lack of aural functionality is making it difficult to write -- I feel as though I can't hear my own internal monologue. Head is too stuffy. I'm off to chug some Gatorade and hope that things clear out.

-R.

Hello Blog; Hello World.

Hello blog. 

Hello world.

It's been a while.

I am sitting on my couch again, and am happy to report that I'm back to loving it, in all its old-person flowered fabric and above-the-mean comfort-level glory. If you've never sat on this couch, I do contend that you are missing out. That said, I'm sure that it was these qualities precisely that did annoy me so the last time that I wrote, given that I was in such a mood as to be perpetually annoyed. I cannot offer an explanation for the fact that I have slipped into the circuitous locution and leisurely cadence of a Southern lawyer (please read this paragraph with a suitable drawl), expect perhaps to say that I loved Matlock as a child. It did not occur to me that I fell far outside the intended demographic for that show until much later. Part of me is still waiting to grow up and be Tyler Hudson.

And, a lightning storm. There was a lightning storm in Cambridge, MA last week; it was our allotted aftermath of the tornado-bearing storm that damaged the western part of the state. I was terrified by all the flickering, flashing and rumbling going on, but I wanted to see what it looked like in replay-format, wanted to watch from the immoderate comfort of my couch; safe, later. So I propped up my little point-and-shoot on my windowsill, put it in video-recording mode and pressed Go. Unfortunately the battery only lasted for 4 minutes, but I caught the onset of the storm, and it constitutes a sort of time-integrated view from my window, if you will:

I'd never seen it flicker like that. 

That's all for now, but I promise to write regularly again.
-R.

I Am Sitting Comfortably on My Couch, Which I Hate With an Abiding Passion

I hate everything right now, except for this pretzel.

That's not really true.

(I rather like my flannel pantaloons.)

It's November, again, and it's time to take stock. Buckle down, count the beans, tighten the laces and whatnot. Let's start with the positives. The Corolla is chumming along happily, in fall, covered with bright yellow leaves. In a week's time, those leaves will be crisp and brown, and it will smell definitively of autumn in Cambridge. Fall in academia is bright, trenchant, new; new talent, new thoughts, new challenges. I have a wonderful set of students this year. I am writing a paper on an entirely new topic of study. I am learning to play a mandolin (named Hermes).

 Well, that worked. I should start with the positives more often. You see, I have been irrationally irritated by things -- specific objects -- in the past few days, and I'm not entirely sure why. Remote controls, for instance. The couch. Plastic bags. I won't get into it -- actually I did, I wrote quite a bit, but then erased it all. Therapeutic, that. You'll never know just how irked I was by that bottle cap.

That said (ha!), I think it's better now. This couch is lovely, and comfortable, and warm. And now I think it's time for bed. Sweet dreams, travelers and friends.

-R.

Summer Doldrums, Over and Over

I started today by failing to kill a mosquito. A sitting duck on the bathroom wall. I slapped at it with my flip-flop, then flailed in anger as it floated away. Two minutes later, it bit my ankle while I brushed my teeth. Spiteful bastard.

I've been traveling all summer. Like, non-stop. First, NYC for PPPCon. Boston. Then Buffalo, to drive to Chicago for brother's commencement. I enjoyed the drive. Always loved driving west on the 90. Always felt like an adventure, a new undertaking -- Go west, young man, and all that. Towards Chicago, City of Industry. This time it felt solidly like a return, which was interesting. Took 10 hours, as usual. We entered Indiana around 5pm, and spent the next few hours eagerly exiting it. The state of Indiana obliged by allowing us to legally drive 5 miles faster per hour, which was thoughtful. Soon enough, the smokestack-skyline of Gary, Indiana loomed before me. We were done. I was back.

It was fun to drive through Chicago again. I love cities planned on grids. My parents have a thorough distaste for city driving, so I was given free reign to drive us all over the place. Evanston, Lincoln Square, Streeterville, the Loop. I took the parentals out on the museum campus one clear night for a photo-op:

Lovely trip. More thoughts on the Midwest, and the theme of Returning, later, perhaps.

(I've fallen in love with commas, a bit. The hesitation, the halting, waffling, a step, forward, back, so on, so forth. It suits my state of mind this summer. It's all crap.)

Long story short: after Chicago, Knoxville for a week. Boston. Then Santa Barbara for three weeks. I'm currently wrapping up my three week stability-grounding phase in Cambridge, soon bound for Buffalo, Cleveland, and finally Yosemite. FINALLY, COMMA, YOSEMITE. To be honest, I am eager to be on the other side of August. Perhaps when the new school year starts, I will regain my inherent stylistic distaste for hesitation, and commas, and waffling, and return to straight, direct prose. Here's hoping.

-R.

Spring Forward, and All That

March. March? Really? Ok, I guess.

It is my quals semester. I should be stressed out, but I've been conscientiously reading some other dude's PhD thesis watching Alex Cabot episodes of SVU and practicing the secret extra verse to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air's intro rap (watch Season One, fools). 

It's getting warmer, and Cambridge walks are wonderful. Garden Street, ever-menacing, fed my deep-seated fears of being lured into captivity once more: Wednesday morning, I counted twenty to thirty brightly-colored candied oblate spheroids strewn between Grey Gardens and Robinson. Orange, yellow, brown. Thought: If M&M's, not likely to be effective child-trap. Reds and the greens are crucial to maintaining visual appeal. Second thought: probably Reese's pieces. Reese's pieces?! A bit lavish, no? I guess jelly beans didn't pan out very well, huh? Third thought: most likely explanation presumably involves inadvertent candy-loss by children (primary consumers?), notoriously unable to hold on to anything. Children of North Cambridge: stop spilling candy everywhere. It's a waste of good sugar, and it makes me anxious.

Walking on Huron Avenue a couple nights ago prompted further contemplation. I was trudging north, grocery-laden, when my peripheral vision picked up on a dark masculine figure emerging from a doorway to my right. Not quite emerging. Lurking. Inexplicably holding a large dry sausage. I'm not resorting to crude euphemism here: the guy was just standing in a doorway, looking out over Huron Ave, holding sausage, preoccupied. Note to self: If at any point you absolutely must be in possession of a large dry sausage, do not lurk. (We mustn't lurk in doorways. It's rude --Ed.). I'm sure this guy was waiting to go out to some dinner party and had decided to bring sausage, which is thoughtful.

Anyway, it's high time I did something productive with my day. Hope all is well, regards,

R.

The R--ts

I somehow bought the clean version of The Roots' Phrenology, which is essentially all just bleeped out. The Seed (2.0) is especially ludicrous. Beware of poorly-labeled Amazon downloads.

Is it weird that I hesitate before typing "ludicrous?" As though "Ludacris" might actually be the proper spelling?

A Thought About Carrots

Eating an adult carrot is somehow much more satisfying than eating an equivalent mass of baby carrots. Perhaps it feels like more of an accomplishment, having vanquished the behemoth root. I ate a carrot, dammit. Much better, more heroic than having gnashed my teeth over a handful of tender, defenseless little orange carrot nubs. Well, defenseless is a loaded term -- I shall not inject morality into this comparison, especially with regard to vegetables that are, in actuality, fully grown*. But the heroism -- this is a surprisingly accurate reflection of how I view my relationship with food: meal conquered, I digest. I congratulate myself often, after meals.

Psychology aside, I think adult carrots exhibit superior taste and texture.

*Baby-cut carrots are whittled from imperfect grown-up carrots to reduce food waste.

Monsters in Bed

Prediction: Zombies will never be sexy.

Vampires, werewolves, even mummies I can sort of see. But zombies -- eyes vacant, unromantic; drooling bits of brain -- will never be sexy. The gauntlet is thrown; a challenge; let all writers of popular prose take heed. Make zombies sexy. Just you try.

I've been watching a lot of Bones lately. The show offers a winning combination of sexual tension and the temperately grotesque: Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz are terrific, and clean bones are not that scary. Given one's tendency to saturate when watching gore-heavy crime dramas, this is a nice thing.

* * *

On topic, you should all take a listen -- carefully -- to Lady Gaga's second album, The Fame Monster. First let me declare that Lady Gaga is brilliant. The Fame was pure, odd, trashpop brilliance. There was something foggily familiar about much of the music, and Gaga was decidedly kooky yet I felt like maybe she was actually holding back to build pop appeal. And, I loved it.

With The Fame Monster, the familiarity is still there (take 'Alejandro;' compare with 'La Isla Bonita' by Madonna), but it's not what's important. The tracks are infectiously, joyously danceable; Gaga's pop sensibility is flawless. The icing on the cake is thematic: the album is filled with blankly-delivered non-subtle references to monsterhood, embracing the current pop obsession with sexed-up humanoids (see Twilight) and simultaneously stepping beyond it into grittier, kookier territory. Gaga's vampires would not sparkle, benign, in the sunlight. They would consume us, darkly, in the dark (primal fear! darkness of soul! darkness of environs. teehee. anyway). She casually croons to us about half-wired broken jaws, heart-eating, brain-eating (flirts with zombie-territory, big points in my book), and her offhand delivery demands that we accept these all as reasonable lyrical sentences. It is great. I particularly enjoy 'Monster,' 'Alejandro,' and 'Speechless' (aside from 'Bad Romance,' of course).

***

Anyway, enough of the grisly/macabre. I have a bad headcold, and will take a nap.

Happy New Year!

Happy 2010, my friends. A few notes from winter break:

- A public health service announcement in Logan airport proclaimed: "If you have hands, wash them." This seemed to me a needless cruelty, a needle in the consciousness of the handless.

- I have read Mrs. Dalloway. I felt while reading that this book was just enormous. Now that I've finished, it's clear that I'll be peeling back, unwrapping, poking at this book for years to come. It's gorgeous; an enormous book.

- After devoting 251 minutes of our lives to the Twilight movies, K and I declared ourselves (a) confused and (b) Team Jacob. What could be more clear? Jacob Black was dependable, gruffly handsome and, most importantly, comparatively good for Bella Swan. Edward was a drama king (always with the biting and the wanting to bite, and then with the revulsion and the random, sudden misgivings). However, to address (a) I committed to sitting down and reading the novels. I suddenly have greater appreciation for Kristen Stewart's deadpan monotone: Bella was written that way (by the way, I love it -- Kristen Stewart's deadpan monotone). I haven't gotten too far yet, but I hear that I will appreciate Edward more via written word. I look forward to a new view.

Other things have occurred to me, but I'm blanking on them now.

Till later,

R.

Returns, Some Triumphant, Others Incurring a Fine

It is winter here in Cambridge. The statement is false, but serves to better illustrate the blogger's state of mind. We are experiencing a frigid mid-October, and it is difficult to reconcile myself with this. I did not fully notice when it was summer; perhaps this explains the shock and resistance to a rather expected and incremental change.

I went for a walk to return a library book (overdue -- evidently one does not grow up, one only grows taller), and remembered that Harvard Yard in autumn is nice. How sad, that I had not crossed the Yard since the late summer: crisp air, red leaves, the notebooks tucked away under elbows, all came as a surprise. I struck an irregular (but deliberate) path across it, pausing briefly at the old stops, examining the old rocks. We are grading our students on rock identifications around University Hall, you see. A responsible TF would refresh her memory, you see; I had a reason to be there. Mostly I just wanted to see them again.

*     *     *

On that topic, teaching is a blast, teaching is a treasure. Teaching is the highlight of my week. Once a week, for three hours, I win. It is a brilliant feeling to TF the same first introductory course that you took in your future field. That said, it will not do to have the sleep-deprived leading the sleep-deprived. This seems to me a disastrous concoction.

Hope all is well,

R

*There are many facets to returning to one's alma mater for graduate school: academic, emotional, geographical. The Yard has taken on the quality I associate with hometowns: a place well-loved; left; regained. But I'll switch focus to the academic-emotional, rather than the geographical-emotional.

Better Than a Candy Heart, but Not as Good as a Necco Wafer

The 2nd floor geochemistry message board is currently playing host to an anonymous, rapidly updated dialogue-by-means-of-pushpin. The exchange has lasted some three weeks. It began, or at least I noticed it, when a smiley face morphed into "Hi!," which was shuffled to a "Hey" overnight. I have the identity of one participant (a labmate); the other is a mystery person in the halls of Hoffman. Having established that I was not involved, the labmate and I recently gathered enough pins to eke out "Who?" on the board. This was replaced, overnight, with a somewhat disappointing "Me." So much for the direct approach.

* * *

My labmate has left for the rest of summer, and the pins have mirrored a slide from assurance to confusion: a smiley face dropped to "?!" Today's reaction to the prolonged radio silence: a heart with an arrow through it. For one thing, that took a lot of pins. I scanned the hallway for pin-poor posters hanging off the wall. Logistics aside, hmm. I wonder who in Hoffman is heartbroken.

Scars: Relating to Sharp Surfaces, or Otherwise

I've developed a nifty double-struck scar across the knuckles of my left hand. Back alley, fist fight vs. Shadow ninjas. One fist. Left.

Actually, I slammed the back of my hand against sheet metal and got sliced twice, by both the upper and lower edges (think: top face meets side; bottom face meets side. Both edges are sharp). It seems I walk with ~10% precision, and this has its consequences. I don't much like getting scars on my hands. Yet, much of my work is manual, and I seem to be collecting them. This parallel pair of shiny fine lines is particularly conspicuous. I suppose that's fitting; subtlety (physical, verbal, emotional; grammatical?) seems beyond my reach.

Thing I like: ambiguous syntax. It's infuriating in the context of academic writing, but delightful when it rears its head in more frivolous settings. (Note to self: the adj form of "levity" is not levitical*. "Lighter" would have sufficed, but "frivolous" is less ... ambiguous.)

Consider this example for the night: top 40 pop song by Sean Kingston titled "Fire Burnin'." Lyrical snippet, sans punctuation:

Somebody call 911 shorty fire burning on the dance floor

Is that: call 911, shorty -- there's a fire burning on the dance floor? Or, call 911 -- there's a shorty-fire burning on the dance floor? I prefer the latter, for the sake of imagery. Ah, but it appears neither is correct:

She's fire burning fire burning on the dance floor
That little shorty's fire burning on the dance floor

It appears that "fire burning" functions as an augmented gerund: fire, as an entity, packaged in, enveloped. It is oddly more illustrative than just plain "burning." One could burn with fever, lust, jealousy; smolder with rage, all without actual flames. If one is fire burning, there can be little doubt. Still I prefer the shorty-fire.


*For some practical advice, and what is arguably one of my favorite parts of the Old Testament, see Leviticus 13 (on leprosy).

Say It All

The wookies' farewell to Yoda. D is moving out tonight, and this was on TV; I looked at K and said, "That's us." It was true.

Everything Old is New Again

My thoughts have recently spun around the theme: returning, and the associated task of perceiving old things anew. Two things came to mind.

(1) Re-reading books. I've found that my perception of a novel changes -- a shift in focus, a shift in meaning, new weight-- as I get older and read it again. I first read To Kill a Mockingbird with a 13 year old's eyes. Accordingly, I think I paid the most attention to the motives and actions of Scout and Jem -- these were spelled out most clearly, and at that age they seemed like the obvious bits with which to concern myself. I read the book again recently. Suddenly rich narrative fabrics were apparent; new threads emerged soaked with new empathy, new understanding. I was shocked at the narrowness of my prior reading; shocked, but then reassured. I had grown since then. One ought to grow, to see things with new eyes. I mistrust the eighth grader who slides straight to Understanding, without trudging through Experience first.

This reminded me of returning to classics, of looking for new wisdom in old places.

(2) The second return is physically manifest: I am living in Cambridge, again. The first time was different. It occurred to me that as an undergraduate, I did not do terribly well with the college campus metaphysical mindset, this strange awareness of being not-at-home. However, I did not understand this at the time -- it was only this evening, as I waited for sushi at the Porter Exchange, that I put my finger on what bothered me. Campus life is partially institutionalized homesickness: we form South Asian associations, world music groups; we inform and enrich one another but do so largely to surround ourselves with comfort, for we are far from home. This vague persistent undercurrent of out-of-placeness confused me, frankly. I did not dare call Cambridge home; that would be treason to my hometown of Buffalo. Campus housing was clearly temporary: we were transient kings of milk crate-castles. Every year we sacked the fortress and cleared the venerable halls for summer. This was hardly motivation to call a place home. I was deeply unsettled with being...unsettled. I felt placeless.

The intervening year in Chicago was an opportunity to see what things could be like. I chose to live there, I was part of the workforce, I commuted daily. When there was traffic in downtown, I knew about it. I returned to Cambridge with hope.

And it's different this time. I have to remind myself to look at familiar places -- Cambridge Common, Harvard Square proper -- with new eyes, but much of the rest is coming naturally. I know the neighborhoods, I ride my bike, I go to the yard sales, I yell at the kids. It is distinct from returning home, but I have returned, and this is home. Good.

Hope things are well,
R.

Update: Jellybean Menace, Really Big Antlers

K reported a second linear candy trail sighting, also on Garden Street: skittles this time.

I was away in Houston for LPSC, and it seems to have rained the whole week in Boston. I returned last night. This afternoon on the walk home, I saw the now-familiar jellybeans still on the sidewalk, swept to the side and bleached white by rain, like ET. Little ET jellybeans. I wondered if they were still delicious.

Also, Tycho Brahe lost part of his nose in a duel. He lived the rest of his life with a prosthetic nose made of precious metals. He also had a dwarf and a domesticated elk in his court, but the elk drank too much beer one day, fell down some stairs and died. It is sad, but this is what makes the history of science worth reading about.

The moral of the story is, keep your domesticated elk out of the cask ale.

This image is on my blog...

...for March Madness bracket purposes. They needed an active link.

Look up "Engelbert Humperdinck"

As I was walking home last night, I noticed a yellow jellybean on the sidewalk. An orange one. Some reds. A trail of jellybeans, strewn along, some stuck in the gaps between brick cobbles. All on my path to home.

I grew suspicious. What if I were walking into a trap!? I felt helpless. Sensible alternate routes were not available: I was nearly home. The rest of the walk was jarring, especially since I knew not to follow candy trails anywhere. This brought up some thoughts:

1) Why a trail, and not, say, an explosion of jellybeans? Assuming a stationary point source, one would expect roughly radial candy-spatter. Perhaps not stationary. Perhaps a jogger, eating jellybeans. This would be most unwise. Subsequent loss of jellybeans would illustrate that one ought not eat while jogging: caution, choking hazard; tragic loss of jellybeans may also occur.

2) It is also possible that the beans were dropped from a stationary source and were subsequently dispersed along the sidewalk by oblivious pedestrians. I would not kick those jellybeans, myself. I would not touch them with a 10 foot pole. *

I am not writing from the basement terrarium of a somerville madman / cat lady, so rest assured that I did not fall into a trap.

* * *

The anecdote brings me to my larger point. I am certain that whoever dropped the jellybeans did not intend to alarm anyone (and, I'll admit, was probably not setting a trap). The circumstance of the jellybeans being on the ground was not significant. The hard cold fact of my fairytale-related paranoia was likewise generally insignificant. But in each other's presence they had life; resonance pushed the system into something altogether unintended. This got me thinking about things that were unintended, but happened anyway.

I did not intend to drive myself crazy with work this semester, but this somehow happened anyway. Again, I propose that this has to do with a superposition of signals: academic circumstance, overly ambitious advisors and my own intrinsic idiocy. What was I thinking? I had a moment last Thursday where I was struck with the silliness of it all: were we really discussing what shape magma lenses might take under mid-ocean ridges? Wouldn't we all be better off learning a trade? The world might thank us to stop being so useless. But then someone said something crazy about helium isotopes, and I was brought back to my old self again. I've decided this episode was a symptom of topical boredom rather than actual crisis of purpose. But still, I need a break.

I did not intend to neglect friends, but this happened anyway. This has to do with the paragraph above. I do not know where January went, or February for that matter. Is it March? Good lord. I'll see you in May, I hope.

This is taking the tone of an apology. I feel guilty. This might have to do with a dream I had last night, in which I did several naughty things for which I should feel guilty, all of which were strange and involved people I know. This must be it. Dear great void: the dream was unintended, and happened anyway. Truly sorry. Moving on.

I'm sure that this is probably not it, but that will have to do for tonight on the vague-persistent-unease front. I'll think about it and get back to the void.

Hope you are all well,
R


* May seem extreme, but I associate stray sweets with the candied house with sugar windows where Hansel und Gretel were trapped, and Hansel nearly eaten, be he fat or lean. Menacing. I paid attention as a child.

Valentine's Day Cookie and Albuterol Cocktail

A return to curiosities:

1. Cake + cookie = ? Around Valentine's Day at Shaw's I found a heart-shaped chocolate cake covered with white frosting, a blue-frosting cookie monster AND A COOKIE ON TOP. This was ground-breaking, to me. I've had cake with cookies, cookie cake, severely frosted cookie cake, and even cookie cupcake (aka Lump of cookie). It had never occurred to me to put cookies on top of cake. This marvelous invention was my Valentine's Day present to 81 Huron, and it equaled delicious.

2. Living out nerd paradigm This week the stars conspired against (?) me: I had two diff eq math projects due in a span of two days, and then my docs put me on an inhaler because I couldn't breathe. Given my post-flu mental and physical haze, it was all I could do to keep track of the derivatives of Bessel functions and the number of species in a given fauna at time T, and -- brace for the nerd statement of the year -- I lost my inhaler. On some level, I felt that this established additional nerd cred that in regular circumstances would have been beyond my reach, because really, I am a field hockey-playing science nerd, and there is just something extra special about asthmatic mathematicians. +5 points

We end with an Amy Adams quote from Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

You need to go out there, and you need to rev your engine, you need to fire it up. You need to grab a hold of that line between speed and chaos, and you need to wrestle it to the ground like a demon cobra, and then, when the fear rises up in your belly, you use it. And you know that fear is powerful, because it has been there for billions of years, and it is good. And you use it. And you ride it; you ride it like a skeleton horse through the gates of hell, and then you win, Ricky. You win! And you don't win for anybody else. You win for you, you know why? Because a man takes what he wants. He takes it all. And you're a man, aren't you? Aren't you?

This ranks up there with Theoden's inspirational speech to the Riders of Rohan, in my reckoning.

Posts will be sparse this semester, a warning.

Ghosts, Thieves, Ninjas: A Compelling and Well-Reasoned Argument in Favor of Sleep Medication

The ghosts are returning.

More specifically, the imaginary intruders are returning. Did you ever do this? In my night-time childhood paranoia, I would lie awake constructing elaborate scenarios to match the odd creaks and pops that propagate through a middle-aged house as it adjusts to sinking ground (ah, western New York) and heavy wind. Thieves, but not just lumbering men in masks with crowbars and burlap sacks. Thieves in my mind always turned out to be Shadow Ninjas: smart, stealthy, agile. When I was terrified enough for forced bravery, I would check the closet ceilings to make sure no ninja-thieves were there suspended. In, out, undetected.

Anyway, I am at home for winter break, and it is windy in Buffalo. 75-mph-gusts-windy. Our houses were not built for this kind of stress, and the duration and intensity of floorboard-creaking gives the impression that other people are walking around in our house while we sit together, with shared expressions of alarm, in the kitchen. A thorough room-by-room check reveals no intruders, or at least no physical manifestations of intrusion. Ghosts I still worry about.

* * *

Lastly, my brother bought a cake today that was, believe it or not, too chocolatey. My brother and I both agreed on this. I couldn't decide if the baker deserved congratulations or censure for the achievement. Censure, I think, for intemperate use of chocolate. Wait, does that even make sense? No. How could I write such a thing. More chocolate is always better. Odds are he or she just used massive amounts of chocolate poorly. Improper use of chocolate. Personal foul. Half the distance to the goal line.

And with that, I remember that I have not yet eaten lunch, and should probably do that before I eat dinner.