brain activity

I just wanted to take a few minutes out of my dull, depressingly uneventful workday to tell all of Jesse's fans just how far I think he's come since his accident.

***

Okay, so this anecdote needs a bit of background. I am, by heritage and personality, a writer. And one thing a writer does (or at least this writer does) is make assumptions about people based on the known facts. (This is soooo different from judging someone, by the way.) Now since I know Jesse grew up on the mission field, worlds away from the techno-savy world us in the States live in, I had made the assumption that his personal computer skills would be on a par with, say, my mother's. (Sorry, Mom, but you know it's true). Not because I didn't think he was smart enough, but simply because he hadn't been exposed to much high-concept technology while growing up.

So imagine my surprise (and delight) when Roy, Jesse's roommate and proud papa of this blogging site, informed me that Jesse had just signed onto AIM Instant Messenger. (For those of you who have no idea what that is, it's basically a way to "chat" via the internet. Think of it as emailing, only with instant exchanges. It's really quite cool.)

Jesse? Chatting online? I was flabbergasted!

I instantly sent Jess a message: "Hi Jesse! This is your cousin Emily!"

The instant reply (see the theme here - it's "instant" messaging!) from him was perfect: "Oh, hi Em! How are you?"

The conversation went on from there for about 15 minutes. We talked about decorating for the holidays, who stole what at last year's family gift exchange (Jesse had a really cool fiber-optic tree stolen from him), and how weird it is to live in a place where it actually snows.

As we were "signing off" (AIM code for quitting the program), I told Jesse goodnight, that I love him, and told him to keep warm.

He fired back at me with "buenas noches."

Luckily for me, my 4 months spent living in Spain were not entirely wasted and I remembered that "buenas noches" means "goodnight" in Spanish. I replied with my own standard sign-off of "ciao," Italian for "goodbye."

"Au revoir," was Jesse's response.

Dang! The kid knows how to say goodnight in 4 languages! Needless to say, I was impressed. I know so many people who have serious issues with speaking the English language (seriously, how is "wazzah, homies" any form of a greeting?), so it was so good to talk to Jesse and see that he's so far ahead of most people.

Thus, I am happy report that, in my humble opinion, Jesse is in fine form and ready to compete in Jeopardy, if only he could stand Alex Trebek long enough. :-)