Starting a second hat

I guess the story behind this blog is this:  I wrote one this spring and summer, pseudo-themed, and it was fun.  So in some sense, this blog could be a second hat.  This also coincides with my start in the cognitive science department at UCSD, which could certainly be seen as starting a second hat.

The thought of beginning a more traditional web log, with some sort of theme I'll have to come up with at some point, seems intimidating for a couple of reasons, one being that the timing element becomes more important when you don't cheat and post the whole blog at once after you've written the entire thing; and another being that I had to come up with at least a name for it to start.  With the idea of second chances, it first seemed to me that I might want a "second-this-or-that" sort of name.

First I turned to the snark of Dorothy Parker, and she had a catchy title to offer: "Two-Volume Novel."  Beginning a second PhD program seemed to fit with that... but not so much with the actual content of the poem, which, like the majority of Dorothy Parker's poetry, has to do with ironically unrequited love.

This seemed fairly inappropriate for a blog supposedly devoted to Finishing the Hat -- the title of a book of collected lyrics, along with anecdotes about writing them, written by Stephen Sondheim (the book and they lyrics).  A fellow classmate at MIT gave it to me for Christmas two years ago, and inside scrawled, "Dearest Liss, Go make a hat!" With a bit of inference, the metaphor (apologies; I've been reading Lakoff!) is clear... However, finishing the hat may be the goal, but Sondheim also refers to the process of making the hat within this blog's namesake song from Sunday in the Park with George (which I've actually never seen):

Finishing the hat,
How you have to finish the hat.
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window
While you finish the hat.

...

Dizzy from the height,
Coming from the hat,
Studying the hat,
Entering the world of the hat,
Reaching through the world of the hat
Like a window,
Back to this one from that.

...

Finishing a hat...
Starting on a hat..
Finishing a hat...
Look, I made a hat...
Where there never was a hat

So we'll call this studying the hat, for now.  And we'll let hat be interpreted as it may... from studies to things falling into some category called [other].  And for that I'll leave you with one further Dorothy Parker tidbit:

Faute de Mieux

Travel, trouble, music, art,
A kiss, a frock, a rhyme –
I never said they feed my heart,
But still they pass my time.