Shortly before I took this picture, my friend James was laughing at me because I was lying on my belly in the dirt to try to get a good angle on another shot. I stood up, brushed myself off and said, "You think that's funny, just wait. I'm about to go lie down on the train tracks."

Juliette, aghast, cried "No you're not! You're going to get hit by a train!"

I pointed out that I'd be right by the train crossing, and the bells would give me plenty of warning, aside from which I'd be able to hear the train from a ways off. James said something like "Won't you feel dumb when this is like the one time out of a million that the arm doesn't come down? Well, not for very long, I guess." Which helped a lot. (Thanks, James.)

"I'm just going to take a few snaps. It'll only take a minute or two, and besides, a train just went by like ten minutes ago so there probably won't be another one for a while."

Juliette relented, and about a minute later I was down on my belly next to the crossing, trying to get a good angle on the shot. As I was lining up this one, I heard a little boy behind me ask "Daddy, why is that man lying on the train tracks?"

"I don't know," the dad responded, "but leave him alone."

So I guess I'm the weirdo that lies down on train tracks now.

Along with an old notebook and assorted random crap, my foray into the office closet also turned up a matched set of Cross pens that were given to me by a friend for being in his wedding. Juliette and I usually acquire pens the usual way, from hotel desk sets and in promotional brochures, so these Cross pens were a significant step up from the other writing implements we had lying around the house. Figuring that they were better used than sitting in a box collecting dust, I brought them out to the kitchen and put them in the pen cup that sits on our counter.

A few days later I was getting ready to write some thank-you notes to my grandmothers for the birthday money they sent me, and it occurred to me that it was as good an occasion as any to break out the good pen. And damn me if they weren't a lot nicer to write with than the cheapo ballpoints I usually use. pen was comfortable in my hand, with a nice, solid weight to it, and the ink flowed smoothly, neither puddling nor thinning despite having been sitting unused for nine years. (My goodness, has it really been nine years?)

Of course, the effect was kind of ruined by the chicken-scratch quality of my handwriting.

I practically never write anything by hand these days. Grocery lists, credit card receipts, Post-It reminders, and the occasional greeting card are about it. I suppose I do use paper and pen for calculations and schematic sketches at work, but that hardly counts in my mind. I do all of my longer writing with a keyboard, and these days even my notes are mostly done on my laptop or phone.

My thoughts tend to move pretty quickly, and the fact that I can type at 100 words per minute helps my words keep up with my brain. By contrast, using a pen feels like trying to run in a swimming pool, and often by the time I finish a sentence I've lost the beginning of the next one. I really don't think I'd be able to get anything done if I had to write it all out longhand.

Still, I can't help feeling like we've lost something by moving away from the analog world of handwritten letters. There's something undeniably special about getting a real letter in the mail, even if the only people that ever send me letters anymore are my grandmothers, and occasionally my father-in-law. There's a certain weight to it, some extra connection granted by being able to hold in my hands the same piece of paper that their hands touched.

My grandmother's script feels a little antiquated, I suppose, but it's also both elegant and familiar. I can't see it without seeing her. Seeing the loops and curves of her letters makes me think of her hands, her hair, the smell of her perfume, the feel of her dining table, where she probably sat while she wrote. I don't get that from an email.

My own handwriting is a jumbled and sloppy print. Letters lean this way and that, drifting away from the lines on the page until finally forced back on track, and the ink tends to drag between strokes. It's all over the place, which I guess isn't too far off the mark, considering the mind that produces it. I sometimes wonder if it would still look that way if I hadn't abandoned pens for computers. Most likely it would, and anyway, typing is simply too convenient for me to regret the change. I do wonder, though.

Will my son learn to write neatly? Will he look forward to handwritten notes from his grandparents? Will his children do the same for notes from me? I hope so. And, fortunately, Juliette's printing is much nicer and more legible than mine.

I recently got myself a new flash with my birthday money; a Nikon SB-400. It's not a very big or powerful flash unit, and it doesn't have a lot of the nice features and manual controls that the more expensive units have, but it does have the advantage of being very lightweight. The main reason I got it was to learn more about on-camera lighting, especially fill flash and bounce flash.

This image is an example of the latter. You tilt the camera head up, and instead of the light directly illuminating the subject, it bounces off a nearby surface, creating a more diffuse light. Here I've bounced it off a wall that's just out of frame, which also provides a nice directional light.

From a composition standpoint, this isn't a fantastic picture. There are a number of distracting elements in the background, especially the reflection in the window, though I bet most people wouldn't notice any of that. The reason I'm showing it, though, is that it makes a great example of how much difference lighting makes in photography. (And, of course, I'll take any excuse to show you how cute my kid is.)

I'm really excited about getting to learn this stuff. Hopefully, my photos will continue to get better.

I mentioned that a couple of weekends ago, Juliette and I spent some time cleaning out our office closet. Archaeologists will tell you that one of the best ways to learn about a culture is to look through their garbage, and so it is with the pile of junk I unearthed from that closet.

One of the items I discovered was a partitioned notebook from my sophomore year of college, containing notes from several classes I took that year. I think it's pretty illustrative.

From my Electricity and Magnetism class:

ρ creates divergence in an E field.

spherical conductor w/ cavity outside sphere: looks like point chage.

charge in cavity induces a – charge along cavity walls which induces a + charge uniformly around outside of sphere.

From my Intro to Biology class:

Population Regulation

Density-Dependent Factors:

• overcrowding
• lack of resources
• increased predation
• disease
• # offspring/female decreases since less females survive to breed.

From my Intro to Systems Engineering class:

II-order Systems:

I-order systems ( x′ + 1/τ x = f(t) ) have 1 descriptor (τ) & exponential behavior, step-response

II-order systems look like x′′ + a₀x′ + a₁x = f(t) but we can write them as x′′ + 2ζωx′ + ω_nx = f(t)

2 descriptors: ζ and ω_n

And, finally, from my 18th-Century Western Philosophy class:

My comment is not terribly pertinent to the discussion, but...

TALK FASTER GOD DAMNIT!!!!!!

HA HA HA! Not THIS swan!

Are you saying it's a waste of horse not to eat old horses?

It's called schizophrenia.

You better not piss off the sun god.

Get your fuckin' hand off my mother-fuckin' taco!

That last sentence was on a page with what appears to be a shopping list for the communal bar my roommates and I kept stocked.

I guess the takeaway here is that it's a good thing I wasn't a philosophy major.

This little guy was very excited to be part of the 4th of July parade in Del Mar. He was also very interested in my camera. Fortunately, I managed to avoid getting noseprints on my lens.

I got to work a little early Friday morning, so I decided to take the opportunity to experiment with abstract composition. This is a close-up of the outflow of a fountain in front of my office building.

Have you seen the double rainbow video yet? It seems to be making the rounds; in the past few days I've seen it mentioned at least six or seven times on Twitter, Facebook, and various blogs. You've seen it, right?

OK, if you haven't seen it, take three and a half minutes and watch this:

If you're like, well, just about everybody, your immediate reaction is to laugh. The phrase "rainbow-gasm" might come to mind. You might idly wonder whether the guy is on drugs. And, yeah, it is funny, and I was thinking all the same things, but I'd like to take a second here and ask you a serious question.

Have you ever, in your entire life, been that happy about anything?

I have known some truly joyous moments. I remember the swell in my chest when I saw Juliette walking down the aisle toward me. And sometimes when I look at Jason, I'm so happy it feels like light is going to shoot out of my torso like a weird, Japanese-man version of a Care Bear Stare. For the life of me, though, I can't recall a time when I was so overwhelmed with excitement and beauty that I completely lost my shit. It strikes me as kind of sad.

For that matter, I don't think I've ever seen anyone I know be that happy, or even heard anyone talk about having been that happy. It's not even surprising to me, either. Being so thoroughly overjoyed and effusive just isn't socially normal. That's why it's funny. And even at that, we're only able to laugh at it because of the separation provided by the fact that it's a video. If you saw someone freak out like that in real life, you'd probably be uncomfortable. I know I would be.

Stop and think about that for a second. What does it say about our collective priorities and values that we'd feel weird about someone being really, really happy near us? Isn't that at least a little bit messed up?

I wish I were the kind of person who could get so worked up over a rainbow. I'd love to know what that feels like. I don't know if I ever will, but it seems like the kind of thing that might be worth working toward.

Juliette, Jason and I spent the entire day at the beach with friends yesterday for the 4th. As we were leaving, the sun had just gotten low enough to light up the sky along the horizon. I didn't actually mean to get the surfer in this shot, but I think he adds a bit of drama.

You may not know this, but this week is Metablog Week. As the founder of Metablog Week, Schmutzie, puts it, "Metablogging happens when a blogger blogs about blogging on their weblog." As it happens, this event fell at a sort of serendipitous time for me, since I've been thinking a lot lately about why I write, and why in particular I write for this site. (In a box with a fox in socks.)

It turns out that I don't even remember why I started this blog in the first place. The story I've been telling myself is that it came out of my high school English teacher's parting suggestion that we keep a reading journal, but when I go back through my archives, it turns out that my first blog post (about which I am now truly and deeply embarrassed) predates my first review by over a year. Of course, I'd had a web site for almost five years by that point, but what was it that made me decide to dip my toe into the blogging pool on that spring day eight years ago? And with a trite political op-ed piece, no less? I don't know.

Of course, other than the reviews, blogging was a pretty occasional thing for me until two summers ago, when my son was born. So maybe I should start there. That was obviously a momentous time for me, what with all the changes entailed in becoming a parent, and the desire to have a contemporaneous record of my life through that transition was definitely a big part of it. But, if I'm being honest with myself, how much had to do with wanting a journal and how much had to do with the fact that I'd been reading Dooce regularly?

See, I've always thought of myself as introverted and uncomfortable with attention, and that's certainly how most people think of me. The single most common reaction this blog has gotten from my family and friends has been surprise at how open I am here, and at how much goes on underneath my staid demeanor.

The truth is, I've always wanted to be famous, though it pains me to say it. Not the kind of shallow celebrity that our reality-TV-obsessed culture is so fascinated with these days, true, but I do have to admit that I've dreamed about getting the kind of respect and admiration that I have for a really good writer or artist. When I was young—the kind of kid who told his boss "I don't want to be in the newspapers; I want to be in the textbooks"—I probably wanted to be in the same pantheon as a Mark Twain or a Gabriel García Márquez. These days I'd settle for being a John Grogan.

(Man, that is so arrogant. "I'd settle for being a beloved international bestseller." Sometimes I strain even my own credulity.)

I tell myself that what I really want is not actually fame, but rather I want to have created something wonderful. My life having been so moved and influenced by great art and great writing, I want to try to give something like that experience to other people. And all that is true, but it's incomplete. I want to have done something great, but I want the recognition for it, too.

Which raises the question: if no one read this blog, would I still write it? It would be facile to point out that practically no one reads it now, so there's my answer, but at this point I'm still working toward the goal of a wider readership. What if I came to the point where I knew that would never happen? Would I still write? After all, I'm always telling people "I like having written but I hate writing."

I like to think I would. Since I started keeping to a schedule over the past few months, I've been finding that the more I write, the more I think of to write. Maybe it's still just the enthusiasm of a new project, the whole "I'm going to become a writer" thing. But more and more I'm finding that the words and topics are flowing more easily and it's harder not to write. There's just so much I want to say!

I don't know if I'll ever achieve any kind of fame, or whether any fame I do achieve will be lasting. I can't deny the desire, though, and maybe that means I'm coming at this writing thing from the wrong angle. I can't help feeling that I'm doing something good here, something meaningful, and maybe that's enough, even if nobody is reading it.

I think the two sentences I've said the most in the past six months have been "Don't drink it" and "It's not a hat." I don't know why Jason wants everything to be a hat, but he really, really does. Cups, baskets, boxes, blankets, my hands, clothes, shoes, bowls, plates (with or without food on them), toys—he ends up putting them all on his head, proudly declaring "Hat! Hat!"

He does like real hats, too. Though, getting him to wear just one at a time is sometimes tricky.