1) She will correct you (and your friends) when you use the word ‘probability’ lightly. Probability means something specific, people.

2) She will make you quiz her on the difference between the Cramer-Rao theorem and the Rao-Blackwell theorem. You will not care, because she doesn’t really care.

3) She will endlessly cite ‘this thing I read’ and then spend ten minutes with her smartphone trying to find it, because she doesn’t want to tell you the wrong sample size.

4) She is broke. (This has nothing to do with statistics and everything to do with her being a grad student.)

5) She is cranky. (See parenthetical above.)

6) She will derail every conversation with ‘I wonder how likely that is’.

7) She will watch all of the episodes of Supernatural that are available on Netflix on an endless loop while she studies. (What, I told you I don’t hang out with other stats students. I have no reason to believe this isn’t true for everyone. (<= That is some TERRIBLE statistical inference that I just did there.))

She wants to graduate more than anything else in the world, including more than she wants to be nice.

Ok, fine. This is basically an apology to everyone for me sucking. And me being mean. And also me being boring. And watching all of Supernatural for the third time (Crockett, that one is for you specifically). I’m very sorry.

Career Day is nothing more than a career fair specifically geared at college students. A buttload of companies (don’t worry, I didn’t say buttload in front of anyone there) show up and set up booths and you talk to them and you hand them a resume and then… I don’t really know. Something happens. They sift through the three hundred resumes at the end of the night and set up interviews for some of them, I guess? I handed out 11, because the number of companies interested in a person with a masters degree in statistics is depressingly low, and I expect to hear from maybe four of them. I will immediately tell one of those calls that I’m not interested – it sounded fun at the time, but now I realize that it’s the quintessential Boulder software company, and I would hate everyone and everything about it inside six months.

It’s good to know yourself.

The most frustrating part of my day, though, went like this:

I wanted to talk to a company that does some sort of television… something. Honestly I don’t remember, because no one ever showed up at their booth and it doesn’t matter anyway. Whoever they were, their empty booth was next to the Navy booth. So I kept swinging by, and every time this dude at the Navy booth caught my eye and I nodded and just kept going…

And then, one time, he caught me. He saw my nametag, which had my name, major, and degree on it, and asked if I was interested in teaching.

I am interested in teaching, so I was like …. ok, what up, yo. He tells me about this instructor position that they have at a nuclear school in Charlotte, NC. (The school isn’t nuclear, they just teach nuclear stuff). Apparently they have a need for math instructors. He gave me the full sale – the benefits, the wages, the fact that you leave after four years with experience. And then he asked when I got my bachelors degree, and I told him, and then he asked how old I was.

I’m 31, I say.

He drags me to every other navy person there (and there were quite a few) asking if I could get a waiver for being 31. I was a little insulted, honestly. He never told me what was wrong with being 31, just that it was something that needed to be waived. Finally, someone tells him that yeah, it can probably be waived. Everyone else in the vicinity of the booth at that point was aware that I was probably the oldest person at the career fair, but hey – that can be waived.

That established, he looks down at my arm and asks if my tattoo is real.

No, I drew purple flowers on myself for Career Day.

Yes, it’s real.

Again with the waiver – except this time everyone needs to look at the size of my hand in comparison to the size of my tattoo.

This fellow was working very, very hard to recruit me, and I appreciated that.

I also left the booth feeling like an ancient painted lady.

I will not be joining the Navy.

I am writing words now, so technically, yes, it does seem to be true, but the true test will come momentarily when I return to the thing I actually need to be writing.

The thing that I need to be writing has the potential to be sort of a big deal (to me) and I’m not quite ready to talk about it yet, but it’s taking up all of my time.

Oh, also? I applied for a professor job at a community college today. That I am willing to talk about, but I find myself with very little to say. I filled out an application, wrote a page about why I’d be good at the job, a page about my teaching philosophy, and then submitted the whole shebang along with my resume and transcript. It was very exciting – but it’s possible that I’m letting Community cloud my judgement. Anyway, even if Jeff Winger doesn’t show up, I think it’s a job I would both enjoy and perform well.

That is if psychic detective is completely off the table.

P.S. Our toilet is bound and determined to run, and it’s going to drive me fucking insane. In my townhouse the toilet ran but a) you could fix it by jiggling the handle and b) I always blamed it on the ghost that lived there with me, so it never really affected my life. This? This is either my fault, Crockett’s fault, or no one’s fault, and when one is faced with a running toilet, one does not simply blame no one. And the handle jiggle is completely useless. It’s very irritating.

Anyway, last year of forever or not (probably not), I’m not making any resolutions this year. I want to resolve to be a better blogger, and to resolve to finish my book, and resolve to not take things at school so personally. I want to resolve to exercise every day, because it is an important a commitment as finishing my homework – for both my physical and mental health. I want to resolve to figure out what makes Cloey puke on the couch and stop her from doing it.

I’m not going to officially resolve any of those things, though, because I have no particular dedication to resolutions and I’m just as likely to do them just by virtue of wanting to do them. Which is to say, slim-to-moderately likely.

I guess we’ll see.

Also up in 2012 – graduation! A job, probably! My 31st birthday in two weeks!

What’s new for you?

• Grocery shop.
• Play Minesweeper.
• Listen to audio books.

Boom. Done. Everything else is either something I do an expected amount, or something I do an a larger than average amount but everyone totally knows (things that fall into that category – gossip when drinking, cook).

Grocery shopping – wev. Minesweeper? Awesome – I play it while I walk the dogs, while I’m in class (sometimes), occasionally while watching television – really any time that I need a little distraction.

Audio books, though? People, are you audio book people?

There are different ways to listen to audio books. My mom, for example, sits down and listens, while doing nothing else.

That’s the wrong way.

The right way is to listen to audio books while you’re doing other things. My personal favorites? Driving, walking, and working out.

Thing that sounds like a segueway but isn’t: yesterday, the hot water heater in my townhouse busted. The tank rusted through, and I had to go buy a new one and pay someone to install it. My reaction to that was… well, first it was to cry. My more measured reaction was to spend some time with Mint.com, assessing my expenditures and looking for places to cut a few corners.

Mint informed for that for the last 32 months, I have spent an average of $30 a month on audio books. (I use Audible.com). With average Audible pricing, which is much more affordable than buying books on CD, that works out to about 2.3 books per month. I rarely invest in a book that’s shorter than 15 hours, because I blow through them so fast.

All this math means that I pay for (and listen to) about 35 hours of audio books per month. Not to mention that I inevitably re-listen to something I already bought at least once a month, when I’m out of credits at Audible and have to wait until the 4th of the next month, when my new one comes. That brings my monthly listening total to ~ 50 hours.

That’s 1.6 hours a day.

I’m awake for about 16 hours a day.

I spend 10% of my time listening to books on tape.

Other than doing homework (and watching tv, which is what I do while watching homework), I cannot think of another thing that I spend 10% of my time doing.

When I saw the dollar signs on Mint, my thought was to cut back on my audio books – but here’s the thing. My books make driving to and from school tolerable. They make waiting for Cloey to fully explore the scents of some recently peed on bush interesting. They give me something to listen to at the gym other than the guy grunting on the pull up machine.

Music, of course, would do all this – but books are stories.

I’m officially setting aside $30 a month to support my habit. The cutbacks will have to come from elsewhere.

I mean, who needs haircuts?

I have a few already, and they’re all representative of either my personal state in one way or another. I sort of intended to explain them, but I’m not sure I actually have pictures of all of them at my fingertips while I sit in class right now.

My new one, though, I picked solely because I think it’s pretty.

I can’t tell if this is a slippery slope. If pretty is my new criteria, I could be covered by next year.

It was…. um….

It definitely happened.

I don’t actually have a great sense of how it went. I left about to cry – but I cry a lot lately, so that’s not a great barometer. Hey, is there air outside? Does that mean anything? No.

We have this thing that we use in class called inkSurvey. It’s actually part of what I’m writing research project on – all 40 of the students are given tablets for the duration of each lecture and there’s a web based program where they’re able to interact with us anonymously. It’s a whole big thing.

Via inkSurvey, one of them wrote ‘be our teacher for the rest of the semester!!’. That gave me the happys, you guys.

And then?

I fucked up two problems in a row, on the board.

I don’t know. My brother and Crockett have assured me that a teacher saying ‘I don’t know’ is not an unacceptable occurrence, especially if it’s followed by ‘I’ll look at it and get back to you’. Plus, as any anxiety ridden slightly obsessive graduate student would do, I double checked what I couldn’t remember and wrote up solutions and put them on the class site when I got home. And also emailed everyone. And also spent three hours this afternoon helping with homework via email.

Basically, I think I’m a good TA.

Just – I wanted everyone to leave that class thinking ‘damn, that was awesome!’. And it didn’t happen.

P.S. It’s Crockett’s mom’s birthday! Happy birthday, mama Crockett. You’re one seriously kickass lady.

The primary reason I’m giving up sugar is because all I’ve developed some crappy eating habits over the summer. Everything was vacation, so why pay attention to how many chips I was putting down?

Also, though?

I’m hoping to lose a couple of pounds.

Body acceptance (healthy at every size ftw) is sort hard to consolidate with dieting. Am I not applying the same acceptance to myself as I do to others, etc?

Here’s the thing, though.

My Joe’s Jeans don’t fit.

People, I have ONE PAIR of really nice jeans. Every other pair I own came from Gap, on sale. (That’s not to say that Gap jeans aren’t nice – they are. They’re just not nice nice.) My Joe’s Jeans make me look and feel awesome. And they don’t stretch. And since this summer, my waist and the jeans haven’t been as friendly as they once were. The jeans still button, but I can only wear them while standing up.

So – I’m trying to be healthier, yes. Tortilla chips and beer are really only probably part of a well balanced diet, and it’s good for me to make an effort to move away from mass consumption of those items. Also, though? I’m trying to get my damn jeans to fit.

Is it not feminist to care about my expensive clothes? I actually don’t know. I know that I feel sort of bad, but that it is important to me. I like having nice (and stylish) things, and I can’t afford to get a new pair right now. (There are probably other things in my closet that will benefit from a slight pound reduction too).

I feel … inconsistent.

Perhaps it’s because I haven’t had any sugar in two days and my capacity for intellectual thought seems to be directly linked to my carbohydrate intake.

Or perhaps it’s because I’m not practicing what I preach.

I genuinely don’t know.

Yesterday, I had a short day on campus (done at 11 due to a cancellation by my grader, who I am starting to think is never actually on campus yay!). I dragged my ass to the gym when I got back to Louisville, and then immediately headed over to Starbucks to meet the lovely Laura.

I beat her there.

I ordered some hot tea.

I found a table, set down my tea, set down my laptop, took off my jacket, and got ready to sit down. In the process of sitting down, I put my hand on the corner of the table, which, it turns out?, was not totally stable.

The tea that had been handed to me 25 seconds earlier spilled all over my forearm, and then my pants and school bag, and then the floor.

People immediately started handing me napkins and a very nice woman went up to the counter to ask for a towel. The barista told her they’d send someone out with a mop in a second.

I didn’t have more napkins, so I just stood there waiting – and I realized that my arm was burnt.

Like, burnt burnt.

I started to cry.

There was literally nothing I could do about it. It hurt like a motherfucker, my bag was wet, my pants were wet, and even my laptop had a few drops on it.

Everyone was looking at me, and I was crying. Like, tears streaming down my face crying, not like big whopping gasps of air snotty nose crying.

The thing is, it actually doesn’t sound that terrible. I mean, the burnt arm sucks. The barista gave me some burn cream as soon as she saw it, and I rinsed it under cold water and then slathered that on. Now it really only looks like a bad sunburn. The rest, though, what? It’s not like I know those people. It was like three Starbucks away from my home Starbucks (yes, a ‘Starbucks’ is a valid unit of measure). I won’t see any of them again, and they could all see that I was burnt, and probably they weren’t judging me anyway because people don’t really think that much about other people.

But still.

The rest of the day, I cried off and on. I said something sweet to Laura and got teary. Laura said something sweet to me and I got teary. Crockett ate something that I wanted to eat and I cried. I took a shower and it was hot and I cried. I scraped my arm with my jacket and I cried. We went to eat pizza with my mom and we got a table I didn’t like and I welled up.

I’m not actually sure what was going on. I don’t know if I felt dumb and that made me sensitive, or if my arm made me sensitive, or what.

All I know is that immediately following my tears in Starbucks, the whole rest of my day blew.

Starbucks is definitely not heaven.