We're going wrong.

DID YOU KNOW? Dagwood Bumstead from the comic strip Blondie was disowned by his family after marrying below his class.

Yeah, it's been a while, or at least I hope I have established a posting schedule regular enough that four days qualifies at a "long time." You know there's nothing I love more than being regular.

Oh man, I had a busy weekend. So, basically, I think that it's ended up that I don't do... work on weekends anymore. Like, I just did a half hour's worth of dishes that had built up over the course of it, and you know that I haven't been that bad about dishes since sophomore year or something. By "you" I mean "Mitra." That's actually who this blog is always addressing, I think. Anyway, if I didn't have a chance to do any dishes this entire weekend, you know that I didn't read any papers on the synthesis of Langmuir-Blodgett films.

But I'm hecka tired (trying to watch my mouth in anticipation of telling Sam's Mom about the existence of this blog), so I don't have time to tell you all about waking up in my lab at 4 AM, or biking to Sausalito and hearing Kelly Clarkson, or a cat with six toes on its paw, or a mariachi band, or my ex-girlfriend Shannon, or condensed milk, or gettin' it on like Diddy Kong, or anything like that. Not tonight. But soon. I have to make a correction to a previous blog entry.

So here, perhaps in a euphoria induced by the best joke in the first new episode of 30 Rock in months, I wrote,

Nature, nurture, who's to say? But let it be known that when I was eight years old, my favorite comic strip was Cathy, because of her views on shopping and men. And really, as far as I can remember, that was the very first sign that I was ever interested in things such as shopping and men. And chocolate. Chocolate chocolate. Ack!

I know, you're laughing for five minutes straight at your office computer again, aren't you? Sorry dude. Anyway, it turns out that that's not actually true. I was having this conversation with someone on Saturday night and I remembered that this was not, in fact, the first sign of such interests. No, actually, as Sam's Mom told me at some point during high school, I think it was at the Evergreen Chinese Buffet, where most of our important mother-son discussions took place, including the one time sophomore year when I told Sam's Mom that I wanted to take Allison to homecoming my sophomore year and she protested that her high school dances were "dens of iniquity," teaching me both vocabulary words and important life lessons simultaneously...

Anyway, I'm digressing again and I really need to get some sleep. I think we were on the topic of some baby we knew and how its first word was "dada" and the Mom was inconsolable. And then Sam's Mom informed me that this situation hadn't arisen with me, because my first word was neither "dada" nor "mama," neither "dad" nor "mom," not "hello" or "hi" or "milk" or "dog" or anything so pedestrian. No, Sam's Mom told me, my first words were "young guy."

Yes, "young guy." By Sam's Mom's recollection, it was because she used to sing me this song, and it used to go "You're just a young guy! You're just a young guy!" I don't know if it's an actual song, or if I'm even getting the lyrics right, but the important part is that I was apparently musically gifted as a youth, even moreso than Shawna, who apparently has some video of her when she was like 1 year old playing the piano and figuring out when she got wrong notes, psh, no, this was like 9 months. Yes, the important part is that at this tender age I was able to pick up on the refrain to the song and sing its pivotal words back to Sam's Mom: "ung ahee." And Sam's Mom translated those fateful syllables as "young guy," and thus the phrase "young guy" has gone down in history as the first words I ever spoke. It's almost like a pair of bronze baby booties, except ones that still fit twenty-one years later.

And Sam's Mom told me this before she knew I was interested in shopping and men. And chocolate. Chocolate chocolate! Ack!