Gymno

succumbing to peer pressure

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Agreed to substitute teach for Scott on Tuesday. Why? Clearly, because I have gone completely insane. I have zero teaching experience (tutoring and SI sessions really don't count) and negative free time on my hands. Sigh. Someday I will learn to say no to interesting opportunities...but I just can't see that as a good thing...

Spent over an hour standing outside in the cold talking to Brian today instead of going to home to do work...not sure why I felt the need to mention that, but there it is. Probably because it was a really nice conversation and I know if I told carrie about it she'd just tease me about flirting with a married man...which is not what was occurring...we just hit each other's intellectual kinks more than most other people do, so it seems natural to talk to him about how cool/interesting/hard my masters project is...sure, I can talk to other people about that too, but how many of them can discuss the finer points of t-tests, paired t-tests, permutation tests, MANOVA, imputation, and statistical significance versus practical significance? I think I may be experiencing my first really satisfying professional colleague relationship-thing. No wonder most fields have membership organizations...it's really satisfying to discuss work about which you are excited with people who share your interest without the pressure of boss/professor/classroom/presentation/etc. sorts of settings.

Just realized how grumpy my last post sounded. Well, I don't feel that grumpy...but I s'pose it was something I needed to get out. Anyway, just wanted to say that, and I just bought a bracelet with a Tibetan Buddhist chant on it, which makes me happy, and I added graphs to my paper and it nearly doubled in length! (19 whole pages!)

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Bah. I have nothing interesting to say as the only thing I do these days is work on my project...well, that, and my midterm. Because defending my MS project in 17 days really wasn't enough to do, I needed a midterm to complete too. But I s'pose I don't really have the right to complain as I seem to have found the time to go to New York City for a few days this weekend...but damnit, I need and deserve a vacation, right? Anyway, doesn't matter, I'm going, regardless of whether I deserve it or have time for it.

In other news, watched Friend or Foe for the first time tonight and it was a shocking demonstration of the selfishness of humanity. Guess my little idealistic being just prefers to think that people would split money rather than be greedy and risk losing it all. Or it was just yet another blow after the disheartening poll reported in the NY Times. As Amelia said, 45% of Americans believe Saddam was personally involved in the 9-11 attacks. WHAT?! I keep walking around, believing that when presented with the truth, members of our society are capable of drawing logical conclusions. I'm not totally naive, I know there are a lot of stupid people out there. I just didn't think it was that large a proportion of our society. So depressing. All right, enough. Carrie has convinced me to join her in a cig, even if it is a camel instead of our usual p-funks. Bah again.