School started last Wednesday. It hasn’t been too bad, so far–I have a pretty good mix of classes (economics, statistics, politics/agency management, and a class called “Energy and Society”) to keep me interested. My professors are all great lecturers and the subject matter looks promising. I’ve bought my books and am, for now, caught up on reading.

In other news: I bought a piano! I found a nice Kawai upright on Craigslist. It’s in great condition; I think it was built in the 1980s, but it feels brand new and very solid. I had a guy come tune it yesterday and it really sounds great. I’ve been annoying the neighbors by finishing up learning the first Chopin ballade.

Along the same lines: I’ve been meaning to put up another podcast. I’ve had the idea for a while and have been putting together a good playlist. It’ll be up soon, I promise!

Anyhoo. Off to bed for me.  More updates on California to follow.

The first time I really drank Pepsi on a regular basis was in Junior High. College Station ISD only had Pepsi vending machines in the cafetaria, so every day I forgot to bring a drink with my lunch I ended up buying a can of Pepsi. Thus, the love affair began. I have been hooked on Pepsi ever since. This is obviously brilliant marketing on Pepsi’s part. I am fully aware of my exploitation by Pepsico and I don’t even care–that’s how much I love Pepsi.

Another great example: Ikea. When I was little, my parents took us along to Ikea in Brussels while they shopped for furniture. They dropped us in the daycare center, replete with Asterix videos and a ball pit. After they were done shopping, we had meatballs with applesauce. Fast-forward nearly two decades: Jenny and I are moving to the Bay Area, specifically Emeryville, which happens to have an Ikea. I was so excited by this fact that I looked up where the Ikea was: only 1.9 miles from our new place! Granted, Ikea’s juvenile marketing is not nearly as smelly an affair as Pepsi’s, but it worked just as well.

Although the two preceding examples are only personal anecdotes, there is no disputing that marketing to children is an extremely lucrative business. It pays dividends years, if not decades, into the future. Although it is definitely not a good thing that the average child is exposed to 20,000 30-second commercials every year (I’m not sure how believable that number is, but even if it’s off by a factor of 10, the point still stands), those kinds of messages are easily forgotten. The best kind of advertsing is the kind that hits you square in the gut years after the fact. Suddenly remembering your favorite Happy Meal toy when you were five, you crave some lardy fries and a twenty-pack of chicken nuggets. The toy cost McDonalds 20 cents in 1989 and has made you spend $5 once or twice a month ever since in an effort to recapture what getting that toy really felt like.

There’s a good reason for that, though. Jenny and I have now moved out of our Austin apartment. We were done yesterday (Friday) around 8 PM; she then drove to Cedar Park to stay with her dad for a few days and now I’m in College Station with my parents, unwinding before we meet up in Dallas and drive on to… *gulp*… California… on Thursday. I can’t believe it. The summer flew by. It seems like yesterday we got back from Europe, but I think the real adventure is finally about to begin.

It was an incredible pain in the ass trying to get everything packed. Our cars aren’t exactly spacious: I drive a Mazda econobox (thanks to Victor for that term!), Jenny drives a Hyundai econobox, and considering we have to move everything but our furniture (that is, clothes, kitchen stuff, computers, books, scores, etc. etc.) it was quite a challenge to cull our wordly possessions down to two cars’ worth of stuff. We had to throw away a lot of perfectly good stuff–including our microwave!–because it simply wouldn’t fit.

Anyhoo–I think we managed it pretty well in the end. I’m just going to enjoy unwinding in a nice, spacious house for a few days before setting off on our 1.973 mile Oddysey to California.

[He'd] open his mouth to talk, only to find the words tumbling out in a raspy, imperceptible staccato, chopping off sentences before they had a chance to form. If he tried to say, “Tomorrow is my birthday,” for example, it would morph into a weak “Ma robf sss ma birfday.”

However, when speaking in front of an audience, giving a lecture, his speech is loud, fluid, and clear. Each type of situation–eating in a restaurant with friends, speaking on the phone, giving a speech–has its own mercurial set of rules.

To make a long story short, Adams was able to get an operation to fix the problem. Even though he was convinced he could solve the problem himself by using a pseudo-scientific approach to his speech, nothing he tried worked. A surgeon at UCLA performed “selective laryngeal adductor denervation-reinnervation,” which basically severs the nerve that is being told to spasm. Adams had to re-learn how to talk, but six months after the procedure his speech is nearly back to normal.

Adams’ experience is painfully familiar to me. As a stutterer, I too have my own rules and regulations: for some reason, phrases starting with an “s” or an “f” are difficult for me, so I try to avoid them and figure out a way around them. Calling some stranger for information on the phone is usually not a problem, but if it’s someone I actually know but am not particularly close to I have trouble. Giving a presentation with some PowerPoint slides is not a problem, but having to read a scripted speech or making a presentation without slides does not work. I try to parse the world around me into situations I know I can handle. Of course that’s all psychological, and of course it’s not much of a solution, but it works, and that’s enough for me.

I suppose stuttering has had its benefits. I worked on getting as large a vocabulary as possible so I can use words I know I can say in a particular situation. And I guess I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t feel like opening my mouth unless what’s going to come out is interesting and worthy of the effort I am going to have to expend to get it out there.

Nevertheless — if I could, I’d get an operation, like Adams did. I couldn’t care less if that’s considered copping out or giving up. Self-treatment of this thing simply doesn’t work. All I can do is mollify. I can’t ever actually fix it.