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I sat in on a seminar at Berkeley. Fantastic. I feel like a fish back in water, my mind latching on to novel approaches to familiar problems—the Problem, really. Human language, what is its form? What are its possible forms?

There are reasons I love Cyteen.

The department seems to offer the most wonderful mix of field work and cognitive theory. The brain is most certainly not a Von Neumann architecture computer, though I think that the arguments for considering it a species of computer are compelling. And to talk of Language, of course you need a broad spectrum of data.

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First impressions: I like this place a lot more. It reminds me of Cambridge, MA: the urban environment is vital, not kept at arm’s length, and has and independent life. Also, the area is denser with people I know—not something to sneeze at.

Yesterday, went to a ling department colloquium, and had great fun there and at the post-talk reception. It had a pervasively academic feel.

I’ve come away from both visits with more targeted ideas of how to write my Statements of Purpose. That’ll be good. If you catch me on I’M the next week or so, yell at me to write. I don’t expect I’ll take much cajoling.

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Good:

• Awesome research happening here; chances to do grammar induction with sparse data, or, more accurately, work on it.
• They sure have funding.

Bad:

• Beautiful lawns with no one on them.
• Feels like southern California.
• Definitely exclusive; will my patent application make up for my lack of published work?

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Well, I feel like I’m officially in the future, now that I have a smartphone.  I got the Droid, a bit of nice Motorola hardware running Google’s nice open-source OS Android, and carried by the icktastic Verizon.  So it goes.

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I spent much of today rewiring the house (with my dad’s assistance, or, more accurately, I was assisting him).  Lots of drilling, crawling in the basement, getting dusty, trying not to inhale fiberglass insulation.  I found it quite fun, but it’s not a usual thing for me, which I suppose makes a difference.  But there was something exciting and satisfying to that kind of work—a nice combination of manual work, and basic network set up of a sort familiar to me.  Satisfying work is satisfying.

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I am here at Swarthmore, doing some work for Professor K. David Harrison.  It’s fun work, and going well—which is always profoundly satisfying when dealing with programming—but that’s not quite what I’m thinking about.  More interesting to me is that this is the first time I’ve been back on campus not explicitly for a social visit.  In fact, the campus is nearly void of people I know, or at least seems so, after the social busyness of senior year and the fact that every visit in this past year has been filled with other people from my year visiting too, and all of our various friends in 2009 being on campus.  I know relatively few people in 2010.

It’s interesting.  Kinda satisfying.  There are things I like about this place independent of the people, but I can also feel free from it.  I will mull over these thoughts more.  Unsure of them yet.

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I’ve just rediscovered an old love: Skulls Unlimited.  It’s still fantastic.

Baboon skull

We used to get their catalog, when I was little. It was the best thing ever.

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Yesterday: thirteen vultures circling above us, as we stood on a hilltop overlooking the river, watching the trees turn golden.  At our feet, a dead snake with its head crushed.

On the way home, a fox.

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Sometimes, life causes you to make it.  In this case, no Toronto/Montreal trip.  I was in a car accident yesterday.  I wasn’t driving, no one’s hurt.  The car lost the front driver’s side wheel.  That’s what you get when an SUV veers into your lane, and clips you.  And the SUV had only a scratch.  Makes me hate ‘em. The people who drove it were very nice, though.

In any case, thanks for the suggestions on Montreal, and when next I’m there, I’ll act on them.  As it is, this week will be good for getting done all the things I was hoping to defer.

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I’ll be in Montreal in about a week.  This will be the tail-end of a trip which will include seeing friends in Toronto beforehand, and I know what to do in Toronto, but Montreal is all unknown to me.  What should I do there?  Let me know what’s cool in Montreal.

In other news, vests.  More vests.  Working pocket watch.  I need more nice shirts and ties; I love my black-on-black paisley tie dearly, but I need some variety.  Toronto should help for this.  Perhaps Montreal also has good vintage and used clothing stores?

No news, of course, on the real activity, which is grad school applications.  No news on that for a while, I suppose, which is the frustrating thing.

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I went contra dancing last night, for the first time in too long.  Advantages to dancing at this altitude include the fact that my lungs were not burning after one dance.  I was also dancing a bit more sedately than I tended to in Boulder, though, as I forgot my shoes, and barefoot dancing, while fun, is hard on the feet.

After, hanging out in Princeton with Chris and Laurie.  There was chocolate and peanut butter and accordion and painful-to-listen-to field recordings.  Good times.

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I got my first case of poison ivy ever the other day.  It’s been quite interesting; it’s all over my leg, due to my not realizing that there was a bit of P.I. leaf stuck in my pants leg for a lot of the day.  It’s a very mild reaction, just small and rash-like, and barely itching—that is, it itches, but no worse than a random something-brushed-against-your-leg itch you might otherwise have.  Yet it’s frustrating, because I’m trying very hard to keep from scratching it.  In any case, Tecnu has been doing good things for it.

So much to do.  It’s good.

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I am going far in the other direction, into activity almost more than thought.  It’s refreshing to be back east, to be home, to see familiar locations with new eyes.  I’ve been making progress on my primary project (grad school applications), and my quaternary project (figuring out what to do with all my stuff, particularly stuff from my Boulder apartment).  My secondary (travel plans) and tertiary (making my various webapps) are a bit stalled right now.  This will change.

One common train of thought for me has been quite absent: food.  To those in NYC that I was going to give cooking lessons to, worry not, I still want to.  But my ability to think about food has been quite sapped since leaving Boulder, for better or worse.  I find all I want is a handful of nuts or berries, water, the occasional bit of meat.  I should try making pemmican, and turn this lack-of-food into something productive.

Beyond that, I want to move, walk, dance, fence, something.  I’ve been doing a lot of hauling-boxes, which is not the most satisfying form of activity.  Still struggling with nocturnal inclinations—it’s nice to hang out with friends, but I feel weirdly bad about being asleep through the day.  The empty night-streets are lovely, though.

More east-coast travel needs to happen.  I’ve made it to Philly lately, but I need more of that, and then there are the other cities: NYC, Boston, Toronto, DC.  To all those I owe a visit: sorry, I’m working on it.

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I just wanted to say that I’ve taken the GREs, and now am free to work on grad school apps and plan my Grand Travel Plans and go on an orgy of visiting folks and being super-social.  It’s good.  My mind is freed.

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I’m here, now, in NJ.  It’s good—it’s been insanely social since I got back, actually.  I somehow managed to hit a run of parties and events.  Good, but exhausting; up until 6am the other day, and regularly up to 2 or 2:30am.

In other news, I’ve discovered a potentially dangerous new sensation: it’s fun to drive a little manual transmission sports car.

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Monday I’ll be leaving to drive back east, across this too-large country.  It’ll be an adventure of sorts, but I won’t be dawdling in the least.  There may be some pictures.  This blog (and everything else on this box) will be down for a few days, as it sits in the back of a car with no internet access.

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You know how sometimes one has Unpreparedness dreams about theater?  The show’s going up, and you don’t know your lines?  I had a dream that was basically the opposite of that.  I arrived at the theater (which was a dream version of NHS’s theater, for those who know it), and found that they were doing Twelfth Night, and their Malvolio had fallen sick, as had the understudy.  So I leaped in, not knowing the blocking, but knowing all the lines, and faking the blocking fairly well.  It was awesome.

In other news, this blog (and other’s hosted here) will be down for a few days in about a week, as I drive this box across the country.  See @transneptune for continuing updates closer to the date.

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This is kind of hilariously misguided, I think.

Also: moving east in two weeks.  Looking forward to seeing folks.

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Hah, PADI open water certification is to me!  Finally.  The water was horrible, in terms of visibility, so we could see the sunken Cessna only from about 2 feet.  But the whole thing was pretty awesome, and I really enjoyed the instruments-only navigation at depth.

In other news, I’ve had songs from The King and I stuck in my head for the past few days.

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Things I love about working here: boss A comes back from a few weeks vacation, and says that things went fine, he just got back to find the airline lost one of his bags, and his car is missing.*  Boss B says “I’m getting you a copy of Dude, Where’s my Car?.”

* It’s OK; his car was just towed from the garage it was in.  He’s remarkably sanguine about the whole thing.  Perhaps spending a few weeks in Cyprus seeing family and friends has him nice and relaxed?