Why is this blog back?

During the past few months, many people have asked me, "Andrew, why don't you post on your blog any more?" I blush and say, "Aw, shucks!" And then I wake up from my dream. The reality is that I have been slightly busy doing other things. Those things have given me some ideas for blog posts, and I'm pretty sure you all want to hear my opinions, especially about the importance of the Oxford comma. Therefore, I am back to blogging for three reasons: I have nothing better to do, my brain is fat (technically, everybody's brain is mostly fat--nerd alert!), and I'm in a different place than I was two years ago, both literally and figuratively.

Time. I simply have more of it. I am no longer writing a thesis, moving, or planning a wedding. For sure, I enjoyed generating a 170 page document (my thesis) that a total of three people in the world will read. Who wouldn't feel that that is an important and worthwhile task? The experiments for that document and the actual writing consumed most of 2010. After that, my move to San Diego had me packing and spending a lot of mental energy on logistics, so that ate up early 2011. After the move, we (my girlfriend -> fiance -> wife) jumped on a plane and headed to New Zealand for a month. That excursion provided a few posts on a different blog (http://travelinghobnobs.blogspot.com/), which, now that I look at it, looks like it took a ton of time and makes me wonder why I am starting to blog again. After getting engaged in New Zealand, we returned to start planning a wedding. If you've done this before, you know that it takes a wee bit of time (April through November) and mental energy, even if you do have a stellar mother-in-law who is willing to plan almost everything. You also know that the To Do List doesn't quite end the day after the wedding due to gift exchanges, Thank Yous, and catching up on sleep. So, now I finally have some time to write and am ready to make you wonder why you just wasted some time reading a blog post.

Mental obesity. During my blog absence, I have been content posting what some call "clever" status updates on facebook (by "some", I mean "me"). However, I realized that this medium required little time, minimal risk, and no real effort to complete a thought. And oh how I like it! Ooh, look, a shiny thing! What was I writing about? Oh yeah: status updates. Status updates are like eating ramen: easy to make, immediately satisfying, and--wow, it's exhausting thinking of similarities between ramen and status updates. There must be millions. Blog posts, on the other hand, are like Kraft macaroni and cheese: it takes more effort to "cook", requires a person to exercise delayed gratification, and . . . Anyway, writing blog posts requires different and (slightly) deeper thinking than status updates. Granted, it's not like writing a novel, which would be like preparing a five course meal in that--forget it, this is too much work right now.

The final reason to restart this blog is that life has changed a lot in the past two years, and I have changed, meaning that there is a lot to explore. I am thinking of altering the topics of this blog from the mundane (complaining about small stuff that bothers me) to more important topics like the rise of the single woman and the decline of the marry-able man, the effect of the video game culture on the tweenie generation, and the development of the presynaptic structures of the sensory neuron AFD in C. elegans. Or I'll just stick to inanities like college football, old(ish) cars, and song lyrics. We'll see how much life has changed.

If you thought this post was horrible, I've intentionally set a low bar so that there is nowhere to go but up. Hope you'll be along for at least some of the ride. And I'll be adding post-appropriate pictures this time around because some of you may not be here for the words.

Probably my greatest achievement during my hiatus was scoring 185 points in one move in Words with Friends.