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.

Am I right?

Seriously. Not only did I write a poorly thought out blog post (I had a point but forgot it on the drive to school and typed something while in class just so I could hit publish), I also got a perfectly nice TA at Purdue in trouble for doing me a favor (not on purpose!) and made a pathetic showing of solving a problem on the board in Linear Vector Spaces. Like, my professor crossed it out and wrote ‘the works of Satan’ next to what I wrote down.*

Sometimes I do or say things and afterwards I think, man, if I had only thought about that before opening my mouth or taking that step, I would have seen the error of my ways. Then I mentally yell at myself – THINK, Emma, THINK.

There are days, though, that even if I had thought about it I would have done it anyway. The perfectly nice TA got in trouble for giving me permissions that only his prof should have been able to grant. The professor was going to give them to me, but the TA beat him to it – and I didn’t know that it was an issue, so I mentioned it to the prof. In retrospect, the best I could have done was talked less – I couldn’t have realized I shouldn’t say that specific thing. I certainly couldn’t have performed better at the board unless I’d gone back in time to the night before and studied matrix inversions – but I chatted to the class while I made my attempt and in retrospect that probably makes my failure more memorable.

Hmm. Maybe talking less overall is a good idea.

I should look into that.

* That is not a joke. He really really loves Dana Carvey’s Church Lady.

Crockett: Are you going to do it?
Me: Nah. It’s a lottery to get in. There’s one in the fall though that you can just register for. (I turned the computer to show him.) It’s actually the weekend of my fall break. Wanna go to Moab in October?
Crockett: The weekend of October 16th? We don’t have anything else going on?
Me: Not that I can think of…
Crockett: Are you sure?
I pull up my calendar and show it to him.
Me: Nope, nothing planned. You want to go?
Crockett: stares.
Me: still not getting it.

It went on like this for longer than I’d like to admit. Eventually? He reminded me that the day of the race is also HIS BIRTHDAY.

Whoops.

Like, being a preschool teacher. Either parents are going to be all ‘hey take good care of my precious precious baby and don’t forget wood toys only and DEAR GOD keep those peanuts away from him!’ or they’re going to drop him off at the front door holding a Pepsi and a bag of airplane peanuts and screech away in their TransAm.

What? I’m not a parent – everything I know I learned from movies.

Also, I apparently think that bad parents drive muscle cars.

Other hard jobs? Working on an oil rig. Crockett and I just found out that someone we know was having a hard time finding a job, and has been working the night shift on an oil rig for the last six months. Apparently he’s lost 35 pounds and is slowly losing his mind. (Don’t worry – he’s got a line on a stockbroker position.)

It’s probably hard being a medical examiner, too. You have to help people identify their loved ones. You have to solve crimes while your pesky cop coworkers are breathing down your neck. You have to stick your hands in dead bodies, like, as a daily thing.

I would think, though, that establishing whether someone was dead or not would become sort of a normal part of your day.

‘Hey, Medical Examiner, we found this dude in bed this morning and he looks pretty dead. Can you check?’

Recently in South Africa, apparently the ME wasn’t feeling inclined to make that check.

Instead, he just took the word of the guy who went to pick up the body. Who, apparently, just took the word of the body’s family.

Seriously. A man’s family found him. He looked dead. They called the undertaker, who came and said ‘yep, sure looks dead to us’. They called the morgue people, who came and stuck the man in a car and drove him to the morgue.

The morgue owner (who I am assuming is the South African equivalent of a medical examiner) stuck him in a fridge.

Without noticing that he was just in a coma.

Sure, the family missed the coma – I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to get all vital signy on dead grandpa’s ass. And the undertaker? Kind of a stretch, but it’s not like they started replacing his blood with formaldehyde.  However, I would expect someone who’s job it is to examine dead bodies to notice when a body wasn’t actually dead.

Of course, everyone who worked at the morgue noticed 21 hours later when the -ahem- ‘dead guy’ woke up from his coma and yelled for someone to let him out of the fridge.

Again – being a person who deals with dead bodies? Probably a tough job. Right up there with preschool teacher and oil rig worker, even.

Making sure that the bodies you’re dealing with are actually dead?

Seems kind of basic to me.

P.S. The actual best part of the story is that the morgue owner called the police and told them that he had a ghost. And asked them if they’d shoot it. The guy doesn’t understand how dead bodies or ghosts work.

Did I mention that we drove? We did, in his big cushy Audi allroad, with cruise control and tinted windows. We were stylin’, yo.

Instead of taking the most direct route:

we went through Kentucky.

They have bourbon in Kentucky, you see.

So somewhere around the S in Kansas, I was driving, and I started to smell something. I asked Crockett if he smelled it – nothing.

He asked me to describe it and the closest I could come was someone painting grass. He couldn’t smell it at all.

(The part about painting grass is not the part where my nose wins.)

We thought maybe it was the little town we were driving through, but it didn’t go away when we were back out in the beautiful Kansas plains. Then we thought that perhaps (and damn we didn’t want to be right) that the air conditioning was having issues. (It’s possible Crockett was also considering that I was full of crap, because he still couldn’t smell it.) We stuck our noses up in the vent and got nothing.

It didn’t go away.

By Missouri, Crockett could smell it too.

We finally concluded that maybe when he took the car in for it’s 100,000 mile service, some kind of fluid got onto the exterior of the engine, and we were smelling it burning off. Like someone spilled oil or something.

I don’t actually know if that can even happen, but we had no other ideas.

So we get to St. Louis. We drive through, stop at the lovely little highway hotel that I found, get our room, and start to haul our stuff out of the backseat of the car.

Our stuff is really warm.

Gosh, we think to ourselves, the air conditioning wasn’t particularly effective back here, was it?

Then Crockett lifts up his (super nice) briefcase (that I got him because I’m super), and it’s got black stuff on it. I thought a pen busted.

Crockett thought one of his laptop batteries melted.

We were both wrong.

On that same seat, he had a backpack – and the backpack melted.

Ok, just the back and one of the straps. The whole thing didn’t turn into a molten puddle o’ backpack – the padded back part browned and puckered, and the straps melted.

Why, you ask?

Because the rear seat heaters were on.

And apparently Audi thinks that the appropriate level to which butts need to be heated is somewhere around the melting point of vinyl.

As Crockett pointed out, what if we had a sleeping grandma in the backseat and she was wearing vinyl pants?

HUH, AUDI?

Did you THINK OF THAT?

I sort of think the whole thing should be Camp Crystal Lake style – boating and fun sexy times and lots of drinks and then BOOM.

People start disappearing.

First a few counselors, obviously, and then – reverse hide and seek style – we start picking up people who go outside to investigate.

Of course, instead of killing them we take them to a party, where there are more drinks and maybe pin the tail on the donkey… some strip poker….

This is the best idea I’ve ever had.

WAY better than last week, when someone wanted to make their game of flip cup more interesting so I said ‘play strip flip cup!’ and then everyone looked at me aghast and I remembered that I was at a family birthday party and they were all cousins.

That was not the best idea I ever had.

This, despite the tattoo artist’s conviction that we were playing some sort of prank on her, is not what I’m talking about. (He has one too).

One Thanksgiving, we ended up laughing so hard we almost puked over this idea: gift baskets for death row inmates. See, if you delivered them late enough, they wouldn’t have time to open or eat everything in there, and you could just sell the whole basket to the family of the next guy in line.

I know. It’s not funny.

Or the time we found the girl who was killed in Monty Python because she weighed the same as a duck absolutely hilarious. I mean, that shit is funny – Monty Python always is – but the idea of that girl looking across and realizing that she weighed the same as a duck and that meant she was going to be drowned as a witch? Pee in your pants funny. Had she been dieting?

The day before yesterday, for reasons unknown, we were discussing whether or not we should have wills. We’re grown ups, with stuff – what happens to our stuff if we die?

We established that if we did write wills, they’d probably be full of secret fuck-yous. Like, to this woman at school (I know this comes as a shock, but I’m not actually crazy about everyone at my school), I would leave all of my ugly clothes. But I wouldn’t say it that way, so she might actually wear them.

Huh. Now that I think about it, that secret dark corner where our humor intersects seems to just be somewhere mean.

Last night I was all loopy and I was trying to tell jokes to Crockett, and here’s the best one I came up with:

Q: What’s more violent than hockey?

A: Getting stabbed in the neck by Jack Bauer.

I still think it’s funny.

See? Mean.

Star: hows the cake planning going
Star: I hope not at all stressful because if it is just make it easy and non stressful
Emma: I decided what it’s going to be
Emma: and then decided to let future Emma worry about how to make it
Star: I do that a lot
Emma: future Emma is good at dealing with shit like that
Star: poor future Star gets the shaft a lot of the time
Star: but fuck her, she’s from the future
Emma: I know right
Emma: also, screw past Emma
Emma: she really fucks me over sometimes
Emma: really current Emma is the best Emma

The thing is, this conversation is from last week, and future Emma is getting dangerously close to becoming current Emma. Or… vice versa. I’m not really sure. Either way, I think I need a better system.

Not drinking, all together.

Because you can only go like 3 days without water.

So I heard.

So just alcohol.

I chose booze for two reasons.

1. I like drinking, so this is an actual sacrifice. I could have given up chocolate, but I don’t really eat that much chocolate. As a matter of fact, I could still say I am giving up chocolate, because I’m pretty sure I haven’t had any since Wednesday. I could have given up cursing, but I don’t really cuss that much anymore and also, I enjoy it when I do do it. Alternatively, I could have given up meat – but that would have been a gigantic pain the the butt, up to and including dealing with a bunch of stuff that’s in our fridge that Crockett would have had to consume all on his own.
2. Drinking is expensive, both monetarily and calorically. Therefore it’s good for me to stop, on both counts.

The thing is, it’s spring break.

This was a stupid idea.

(By all means, call me on this copout. You deserve better, you really do. I’ll make it up to you.)