the j-curve

singing into the void

2009-03-05T00:58:00.001-08:00

I'm resuming this blog, but I'm not going to inform its former readership (a few people at best) that I've resumed it, which means that in all likelihood, no one will read this. I kind of dig it that way, because all I really want is an everywhere-accessible journal, no audience required. But since the gestalt of our current world seems to be such that even one's semi-private ramblings are meant to be tacked up for display in some remote corner of the public space, I'll do my part and toss this out there.

I think I have an ulcer. Or maybe colon cancer. My stomach does funny things on and off, and I really need to get it checked out. I should make a doctor's appointment tomorrow morning. And I should do the dishes. Those can be my two productive things before I go to work.

Or I could never, ever get out of bed again, and that could work out okay too. I feel like there's cement in my chest. Is that possible? why am i writing properly if no one is reading?

jobs, himalayan food, death, babies, and boobies

2008-01-19T15:11:00.000-08:00

Well, the new posts on this blog continue to be sparse, despite my intentions otherwise. Maybe if I just resign myself to the rarity of my entries, the nagging pressure will go away and I'll be more inclined to post more often. Or maybe I won't, but I just won't care.

The new semester is going well at work, and along with all my kids from last semester, I have a new student who is bright and reasonably motivated. I like her a lot, probably in part because she is an 8th waver (freshman) and therefore not yet jaded and crabby (which is not to say that I hold it against my 6th wavers--i.e. seniors--for being jaded and crabby; I certainly acted that way when I was a senior).

Last weekend DWE was finally back in town, and we had a great time. Friday night he picked me up from work, and we went to Albany, which is just northwest of Berkeley. We walked all around the downtown area, then ate at a really good Nepalese restaurant. The thing I had was sort of like a yellow curry and it rocked my world. On our way home from dinner, we spontaneously decided to drive to Bakersfield the next morning. DWE got to meet my brother, sister-in-law, and step-mom, and everyone seemed to like everyone else. And DWE got to see how I'm the loudest, most obnoxious person in my family and how they all make fun of me. And he endeared himself further to my mother by being enthusiastic about playing with Emma (who, I should note, really is a bit calmer and better behaved than her predecessor, Hannah, who is the dog that some of you may have met).

This past Tuesday and/or Thursday was the anniversary of my dad's death (Tuesday if you go by two years to the day, Thursday if you go by date). I didn't end up doing much on either day, even though DWE made an effort to be home on Tuesday night. It was sad, and maybe a bit harder than last year, but it was also nice to spend time thinking about him and telling DWE stories about him. It's kind of amazing that it has been two years already, and it's good to remind myself that I can be sad sometimes but that life still goes happily on.

I guess my semi-big news for the moment is that DWE is planning to quit his job. The reasons why are complex, but can be most easily be summarized as "he is unhappy and frustrated for a variety of reasons, and he thinks that his talents can be of more use somewhere else." (This is more or less how he would summarize the reasons; my summary would be more along the lines of "his boss is a weaselly, smarmy little dick who doesn't deserve all the time and energy that DWE gives him.") The reason that this is big news in my life is that it is entirely possible, if not fairly likely, that DWE will find a new job that is not in the bay area, and if he relocates, so will I (although not before June, when my obligation to my current job ends). It could end up being a big step for us, though, because I told him I wouldn't move unless we are engaged (yes, I'm demanding, but hey, a girl's got to be practical).

I mentioned in my last post that I didn't get to see AK when I was in Oregon because she was poppin' out a baby, so I will close this post with a funny story and a cute picture. AK sent out pictures of her new daughter, KK, but somehow they didn't get sent to me even though they were supposed to. So she wrote to me last week to say hi and see how I liked the "nipple shot." Apparently, when she mass-emailed pictures of her and the baby (and her hubby and her older daughter G, who is looking so grown up and adorable that I can't even stand it) from the hospital, she accidentally sent one where her nipple is hanging out of her hospital gown. She forwarded them to me, and it's pretty hilarious, but lieu of posting her booby on the internet, I will just show you how cute newborn little K is.

lucky number 2008

2008-01-03T18:08:00.000-08:00

As you may know, New Year's Eve/Day is my favorite holiday. This year I was up in Portland for the occasion, and for the most part I had a delightfully good time, especially at the two awesome parties that AB and IB so graciously threw. It was great to see everyone (except AK, whom I didn't get to see because she was busy giving birth to her second child...what a lame excuse...), especially B, who came all the way from Seattle. It was also cool that DWE was there, and I think he had a good time hanging out with my posse.

Rebel and B being adorable at AB and IB's "grown up" party.

The view of the Hawthorne Bridge from our hotel room on New Year's Eve.

DWE and I just prior to going out on New Year's Eve.

And yet, despite the fun I had, despite the generally hopeful feeling I get around the start of a new year, and despite the fact that 8 is my lucky number, I'm feeling uneasy about 2008. I want to make resolutions, but I feel cynical and doubtful about my ability to change. I'm frustrated because I've had a cold for almost three weeks now, and I'm tired and run down, and I know I would probably be well by now if I took better care of myself. I feel a lot of uncertainty about the future, but I'm having a difficult time framing that uncertainty as a positive thing.

Anyway, I'm still pondering the resolutions, but I think I've decided on one for sure, which is to drink less alcohol. It isn't that I drink so incredibly much now, but I drink more than I should, and sometimes when I start drinking I have a hard time moderating myself (such as on New Year's Eve). I don't like it when parts of the evening are blurry, or when I get obnoxious, or when I'm all hung over the next day. And alcohol is expensive, and I think one of my other resolutions is going to have to do with fiscal responsibility.

So I guess I am going to make resolutions, even if I feel sort of cynical about it. Maybe I'll feel better once this damn cold is gone.

merry christmas!

2007-12-25T14:09:00.000-08:00

I know it seems like I only blog on major holidays now, but it's just been one of those months.

Have you missed me? Of course you have. Let's not make a big scene.

There's not much to say to catch you up since Thanksgiving. I spent a few more weeks feeling pretty depressed, which made things with DWE kind of difficult, and which largely explains the lack of blogging (or doing much else besides going to work and moping around feeling sorry for myself). I'm feeling much better mentally, but now I have a cold. It was actually kind of funny, because I often used to get sick during finals week, and now I'm getting sick during my students' finals.

Speaking of my students, I ended the semester feeling pretty good about how my classes are going with most of them, and also looking forward to how I can be a better teacher next semester. There are a few frustrating situations (like the student that I've had to re-teach negative exponents to at every class for the last three weeks), but in general I feel happy about how work is going.

I've been in Bakersfield for Christmas, which is lovely as usual. My great aunt is staying with us this year, which is especially cool. I got a new digital camera (to replace the one that got stolen in Ghana) for Christmas, so now I really have no excuse for not posting pictures. Here's one of most of my extended family on my mom's side:

My mom and I are on the far right, with my brother and my sister-in-law next to us, and my great aunt next to them, and my uncle behind her. The other four people are my mom's cousin, her daughter, her daughter's husband, and their newborn.

(happy thanksgiving)

2007-11-22T23:19:00.000-08:00

Well, I had a lovely Thanksgiving day with the fam here in Bakersfield. I saw the Rockettes in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, we played Scrabble, we played badmiton (which I suck at, in case anyone was wondering), we watched football, we ate Chex mix, and my mother made four pies (if you're counting, that's one pie per person...she didn't want anyone to be disappointed by not getting exactly what they wanted).

And yet, I feel a bit blue. I'm a little stressed out about money (the holidays = unpaid time off), I still don't know what to do with my professional life (I love my job, but it isn't a career), and I miss DWE too much (by which I mean he's been gone as much as usual, if not less than usual, and for some reason it's harder than it used to be). I have some vague sense that the free time and the independence that I have when he's gone is really a blessing, but I'm struggling to figure out precisely what it is that I want to do with my time (other than watch Law and Order reruns, which I finally stopped doing a half an hour ago).

I suppose what I should do right now is go to bed, since my mother and I are going to make some attempt to hit the sales at Target tomorrow (but probably not until 9 a.m. or so...we don't do that whole nutty 4 a.m. thing). I just finished transfering all the music on my ipod to my new computer, which was a small but satisfying accomplishment (that wasn't really apropos of anything; I just thought I'd mention it because I am mildly pleased with myself).

(Is this post heavy on the parentheticals or what?)

the most dangerous cities in america

2007-11-19T01:56:00.000-08:00

A controversial study was recently published by CQ Press which purports to rank American cities by crime rates. Apparently, the study has been attacked as "an irresponsible misuse of crime data," a criticism upon which I am entirely unprepared to comment. All I can say is that, according to this study, my current hometown of Oakland, California is the fourth most dangerous city in America, and Richmond, California (the much smaller city where I work) is the ninth most dangerous.

Needless to say, my mother is very proud.

I'm not even a little bit surprised by either of these rankings. Oakland, like any city, has its sketchy parts, and they are truly quite sketchy. I, however, live in one of the safest and most gentrified parts of Oakland, and not a second should be wasted worrying about my safety in good ol' Rockridge. As for Richmond: yep, there's quite a bit of violence (hence the need to help the kids avoid all the violence and go to college instead). Most of the shootings are north of the BART station, while I work just south of the BART station, and I never walk by myself after dark. Also, there's been a very admirable community effort to stymie the violence through grassroots organization (there's this thing called "Tent City" which is sort of an intense version of a neighborhood watch, and which is apparently working pretty well).

I know it's kind of silly, but I'm almost a little proud that I live and work in the only two Californian cities to make the top ten on the dangerousness list. It isn't that I want to be in danger; it's more that I recognize that danger is out there, and I'm glad to be aware of it and acting in some very minor way to combat it (I figure that any time I spend in Oakland or Richmond during which I don't commit a crime is decent progress).

lonely and politically ambiguous

2007-11-17T18:16:00.000-08:00

I've been contemplating my social life (or lackthereof) this evening. I have friends here, but I rarely see them, partly because I don't make the effort to contact them. To some extent, I have been busy with DWE and with out-of-town visitors (last night my stepmom and her friend were in town, and last weekend Muffin was here), but I've also just been antisocial and moody. And of course, since I get home from work at 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, my socializing is generally limited to just weekends. So, I wish I had something to do tonight, but I suppose it's largely my own fault that I don't.

Instead of being social, I'm sort of goofing off and sort of trying to clean a little (after being inspired by Rebel's bout of weekend cleaning). I just took a sort of interesting but sort of dumb quiz at The Political Compass that is designed to situate people on a political spectrum with two dimensions (social and economic), the theory being that it is more insightful than the traditional single-dimension left-to-right spectrum. I agree wholeheartedly with the concept, because socially, I consider myself highly liberal, but economically, I'm moderate-to-conservative. It's why I'm hesitant to classify myself as a Democrat (but I do anyway, more or less). Anyway, after taking the website's quiz, here's where I'm supposedly situated on the compass:

The Political Compass

Economic Left/Right: -2.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.00

Obviously I expected to land closer to the "Libertarian" end of the Social spectrum than the "Authoritarian" end. I'm certainly not a Libertarian (as an overall ideology, I think it's pretty dumb), but I support legalized marijuana and abortion, I oppose the death penalty, I am concerned by anti-terror curbing of civil liberties, etc. But I really don't consider myself to be as economically "lefty" as the quiz is telling me that I am. The reason for the discrepancy brings me to why I think the quiz was kind of stupid: some of the questions had (in my opinion) flawed premises and therefore elicited very misleading answers from me. For example: "The only social responsibility of a company should be to deliver a profit to its shareholders." Well, in theory, I strongly agree with this statement. Companies aren't designed to make the world a better place, and that's not what they exist for. They exist to make profits, and that is what they should do. But what of the environment, the downsized employees, etc? Well, the environmental costs of what the company does should be paid by the business along with all of its other costs through very carefully designed regulatory systems. That way, the business only polutes to the extent that it is profitable to do so (keeping in mind that it's probably not profitable to pollute very much, because pollution is very expensive when you have to pay for all of its consequences). Companies should support the employees that they lay off by paying high taxes that ensure that the government can afford really good public health care, retraining programs, etc.

My point is, I don't think it is the responsibility of a company to be anything other than a ruthless little profit machine. I think it is the responsibility of government, not business, to protect its people and its environment. Business should merely be made to pay their fair share in order to help the government do all this (after all, government is gracious enough to support the legal and property rights that businesses rely on).

So in retrospect, I should have answered that question with a "strongly agree", but instead I said "disagree" because I don't think that business should be given the latitude to tromp all over people and the environment, and I feel like that's what the question was implicitly asking. But maybe I was overthinking the whole thing. But this also brings me to the point that my actual view involves a pretty powerful federal government that collects a lot of taxes and does a lot of stuff, which should probably scoot me a bit closer to the "Authoritarian" end of things.

Yeah, so, did I mention how bored I am?

math woes

2007-11-15T23:58:00.000-08:00

I cried at work today. Okay, I'm lying. But I did cry, very briefly, in the parking lot of the Bank of the West which is between work and the 7-11 where I get my Dr. Pepper fix. I was crying because one of my students got an F on the test he took today, and which I helped him prepare for yesterday.

This is hardly the first time since I started teaching that one of my students has failed a test, and I knew that he was really struggling with the material, but for some reason I just found it particularly devastating. Obviously I can't control the grades my students get, but I do feel responsible, partly because I don't know if I am doing a very good job teaching this particular student. He is in Pre-Calculus, a subject which I neither enjoy nor excel at. I don't know how to make it interesting to him, because I don't find it interesting. His class moves very quickly, and is very challenging, so I don't have time to linger over underlying concepts or to review the stuff he should have learned in Algebra 2 (apparently his Algebra 2 class last year was kind of a mess, so his foundation in terms of understanding functions and graphing is really weak). As a result, there's a lot that he doesn't understand, and therefore much of what he knows how to do he knows by rote rather than through actual comprehension. That's the way I learned math in high school (I think that's probably how most students learn it), and it contributed to both my lack of success and my hatred of the subject.

The upside is that my feelings of failure are motivating me to seek out and embrace my inner Pre-Calculus Goddess. I plan on taking a copy of his textbook home with me over Thanksgiving break so that I can immerse myself in the next few chapters, both to understand it in a less superficial way and to figure out what is interesting and cool about it. I'm hoping that my brother will be helpful in this endeavor (although I have a sneaking suspicion that he hated Pre-Calc too...it's kind of a stupid class because it's a hodge-podge of semi-difficult concepts that are sort of helpful to know before Calculus, but it has no unifying theme the way that, say, Calculus or Geometry do). Anyway, maybe I'll be a better Pre-Calculus teacher after Thanksgiving.

One bright spot at the end of the day was that I taught a class for one of my coworker's students. The coworker is Mr. W, who is probably my closest work buddy, and who sits across from me. Our desks face each other, so pretty much all of his students know who I am (and I know them). The particular student I taught today is this really funny, outgoing sophomore, and she absolutely cracked me up for the whole hour I was with her. We were learning about the different methods for proving triangle congruence, which involve combinations of angles and sides. So if you know that two triangles have two pairs of congruent sides and one pair of congruent angles between those sides, then you know that they are congruent using the "side-angle-side" method of congruence, referred to as "SAS". But this student says "Saaaassss!" in this really funny voice, and for SSS congruence, she says "Sssssssssss!" And then in the middle of class she was like, "Do you want to scratch my ear?" I said, "Um, no, not really. Did you want me to scratch it?" "No, I just wanted to check." It's good that she's not usually my student, because I have a hard time keeping her focused (because I have a hard time staying focused, because I just want to sit around and gab with her and let her crack me up).

Well, there's discouragement in every job, and at least if I feel like a failure with one student, there's always another one that I feel like I'm doing great with.

drunk posting

2007-11-10T23:12:00.000-08:00

helloooooo! hi. i'm at home with dwe right now. we went out for dinner and beers with his boss and one of his other coworkers (it was basically a business meeting that they let me tag along to...dwe feels bad because he's convinced it was really boring for me...it wasn't that boring, but i'll let him think it was because i can score points that way...). after that, we went at got a drink at the conga lounge, which is this tiki bar a few blocks from my place. i would have liked to stay longer, but someone was tired and wanted to go home. so now i'm being kind of a punk to him, because i'm kind of annoyed. he's watching the end of a football game on his computer, and i'm blogging on my computer. we're pretty lame (but also cute because our computers match).

muffin is coming to the bay area tomorrow! i'm so excited because he'll get to meet dwe, and because he gets to see my new apartment and stuff. and also i haven't seen him in a few months, so it's exciting.

dwe is trying to play footsy with me now. i think he's tryingto figure out if i'm annoyed. we're listening to bruce springsteen. i LOVE bruce springsteen.

anyway, i'm being silly. later dudes.

math trick and the return of the internet

2007-11-05T22:16:00.000-08:00

Just when I was about to cave in and pay for internet, the mysterious unsecured network reappeared. Yay! Assuming that it sticks around, I'm going to do my best to get far more prolific on your asses, so stay tuned!

In the mean time, let's do a fun math trick, shall we? First, grab a calculator, or pull up the one on your computer. Now punch in the first three digits of your phone number (not the area code). Complete the following operations, making sure to hit "enter" or the equal sign after each one:

multiply the first three digits of your number by 80
add 1 to the answer
multiply the answer by 250
add the last four digits of your phone number to the answer
add the last four digits of your phone number to the answer again
subtract 250 from the answer
divide the answer by 2

Recognize the number you got? Pretty cool, huh? I did this with one of my students, and she told me it was "hecka tight." Anyway, here's why it works:

Let x=the first 3 digits and y=the last four. Based on the instructions, we get:

[(80x+1)*250 + y + y -250]/2

Does everyone remember how to simplify an expression? We have to distribute the 250 into the 80x + 1, giving us 250*80x + 250*1 = 20,000x + 250. We also know that y + y = 2y, so we end up with:

(20,000x + 250 + 2y - 250)/2

The 250s cancel out, and then we divide by two, giving us:

10,000x + y

If you multiply, say, 123 by 10,000 you get 1230000. Obviously, if you add 4567 to that, you get 1234567.

Yeah, I know. That's five minutes of your life that you'll never get back. Sorry.

But look, here's baby M (practically toddler M now!), all adorable when I went up to Portland to visit:

not so much with the internet again

2007-11-03T13:37:00.000-07:00

I'm not really sure why I thought that stealing a weak, unsecured wireless signal was a permanent solution to my internet needs. 'Cause guess what? It wasn't. The signal, alas, has gone away, so I've been sans internet at my apartment again for more than a week. Hence no blog updates.

Right now I'm at Shine Laundromat, my local laundry joint, which has free Wi-Fi. I'm wondering how long I can get away with being here. My laundry is probably ready to go in the dryer, but I'm going to wait a little longer before I check, I think.

So, what's new in my world? Not much, I guess. I'm still really enjoying my job, and becoming more and more attached to my students and there math successes (or lack thereof: I spent all of Thursday night in a funk because one of my 6th Wavers got a D on a quiz). (By the way, "6th Waver" just means he's a senior, and that he's in the 6th cohort of students to go through the Making Waves program.) One of my 7th Wavers just got an A on a quiz though, which is a big deal because she has some major test anxiety issues.

DWE and I went to The City on Halloween to go to a party that one of my coworkers had. It was fun and pretty mellow, which was what I was in the mood for (as opposed to being in the mood to get wasted and flash my boob). We dressed up as vikings, which involved viking helmets, swords made out of cardboard, foil, and duct tape, and capes made out of twin-size sheets. So yeah, it was kind of lame, but at least we dressed up.

Other than Halloween and the safety meeting* last weekend, I've been pretty antisocial lately. I haven't seen my USF buds in ages (even E I haven't seen for at least two weeks, now that he has his own place). I also haven't seen S in close to two months now (although things between us are cool again). It's hard to socialize on a weeknight when I get off work at 9, and I was out of town two weekends in a row. DWE was around more than usual as well, although that was mostly on weekdays. Anyway, the point is that I should really try to get together with some people sometime this weekend, or I'm not going to have any friends left anywhere in the Bay Area.

Okay, it must be time to switch my laundry now. I'm going to suck it up and start paying for some sort of internet, so hopefully I'll be back to my regularly scheduled blogging soon.

emma the freakshow

2007-10-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

One of the highlights of a trip to Bakersfield is getting to see my mother's dog Emma. She is as adorable and slightly ill-behaved as always. This afternoon my mother was spreading grass seed on the lawns in the backyard using this cool wheelbarrow thing that spews the seeds out the bottom in a circular motion. For reasons that are totally unclear to all of us, Emma loves these grass seeds. She sticks her nose right in the wheelbarrow and eats as much of it as she can until we stop her. Then when we start spreading the seeds, she runs along the side of the spreader and tries to catch the seeds in her mouth.

why i haven't posted pictures recently

2007-10-17T00:14:00.000-07:00

Rebel claims that she's boycotting my blog until I post pictures of my "new" apartment (of course, she also claims that when we lived together I used to sit around in nothing but my bath towel for hours on end, and clearly I would never do something like that, so do we really believe her?). In an effort to woo her back, I just took a bunch of pictures of my apartment using my sister-in-law's camera, which is the only camera that I currently possess (my old one was stolen in Ghana, as you may recall). I realized just now that my dear sis did not give me the cord that hooks the camera to the computer, so I can't upload the pictures. Sorry Rebel. I tried. (And I can post pictures this weekend when I go home to Bakersfield.)

I have the mood lighting going on in my apartment right now, which means a "fire" (aka Duraflame log) in the fireplace and all the candles lit. Candle and fire light are neat when you have wood floors, because the floors are shiny and reflect the flickering light. This is the first time I've ever had wood floors, and the first time I've ever had a fireplace (excluding the house I grew up in, which always had a fireplace, and has had a few rooms with wood floors since I was in college). This is also the first apartment I've had with a bay window, which is noteworthy because bay windows were one of those things that I always wanted when I was a kid.

Anyway, I'll post pictures of all of these things as soon as I can.

airport

2007-10-15T09:55:00.000-07:00

I'm early for my 11:15 flight back to Oakland, so I'm taking advantage of PDX's free wi-fi. It's weird that I'm going to be at work in a few hours. I'm debating whether or not to drop my bag off at home or to go straight to work from the airport. I suppose I'll see how long it takes me to get to the MacArthur BART station (that's where I would transfer to the Pittsburg/Bay Point line, which goes to Rockridge) and decide then whether I have enough time to go home. Technically as long as I get to work by a little before four I'll be fine, but I'd prefer to be there by three at the latest (which shouldn't be a big problem because my flight lands at 12:55 and I'm not checking any luggage).

I had a great time in Portland this weekend, and although DWE couldn't make it back up here, he is coming back to the Bay today (in fact, his flight may be coming into Oakland around the same time mine is). I'm getting kind of spoiled with him being home so much (and when he's not home I just jaunt off on a fun trip, of course).

When I started this blog entry it seemed like maybe I had something interesting to say, but apparently not. I guess I should go get in the security line.

new computer

2007-10-13T18:40:00.000-07:00

I finally got a new computer. Yay! It is an HP laptop, and it's shiny and black and silver.

The reason I bought it today (other than the fact that I really needed it) is that I am in Portland right now. I decided on Thursday to take a spontaneous trip up here, and I found a really cheap ticket, so I got on a flight on Friday afternoon. The weather here is absolutely gorgeous, and of course it's wonderful to see my friends. (I also came up here to try to take care of DWE, who has been really sick, but he had one of his many work emergencies and had to go to D.C. at the last minute.)

Anyway, there's no sales tax in Oregon, so I saved about $50 on my $600 laptop.

I'm being antisocial, so no more blogging for now, but hopefully I will be back to posting regularly.

my sad little world without internet

2007-10-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

So this whole thing where I don't have internet at my apartment is kind of a drag. When E was staying with me, I was able to use his computer to get online, and now DWE is here, and I'm using his. I don't want to get DSL because I don't want a phone line, but I don't think my apartment is hooked up for cable, either. And even if I did have internet, my computer keeps doing that thing where it randomly shuts down all the time, so it's only semi-usable at this point. Really what I need is a new computer, but it will take me a couple months to save up enough money. In the mean time, I check my email and pay bills and stuff at work, and I just neglect other things like reading peoples blogs or updating this one. Sorry about that.

DWE has been in town for a few days, and we are having a nice time together. Right now he is at the grocery store buying ingredients to make me french toast. Isn't he cute?

I had a good week at work, but I'm bummed out because I had to give up one of my students. Basically, students are put in MEP (Math Empowerment Program) because they are getting lower than a B- in their math class, or because there is some other reason to think that they need extra math support. One of my students is doing really well in Geometry, and she's really bright and sweet, and I love working with her. But since she is doing so well, and since it appears that she has the ability to continue to do well without my support, she doesn't actually need to be in an MEP class, so now she's not my student anymore. I'll miss her, and I'll miss the gratification of having at least one student that seemed to retain everything I taught her, but it's also kind of exciting to get a new student.

i have officially become one of those girls...

2007-09-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

...who talks about her boyfriend constantly on her blog. (Are there girls that do that? I'm just assuming there are.) But today is our one year anniversary, so I felt the need to mention it. I don't really have much to say about it, though. Neither of us did anything nice for the other. He texted me earlier this evening to say happy anniversary and to say that he was thinking about me, and then he called a little while ago, but we didn't talk for long because he's still out with client-type people (although he did say he'd call me later).

Anyway, I guess it's kind of cool insofar as technically, this is the longest I've ever had a boyfriend (IB and I only made it 10 months or so by the official tally, but we did have sort of a quasi-relationship for a while after that). And this is certainly the most serious relationship I've ever been in, in terms of my level of commitment and my hopes for the future. It's easy to imagine finding someone else who would be, for lack of a better phrase, a "better boyfriend" (you know, someone who isn't gone all the time and isn't insanely busy and isn't terrified of commitment and emotions), but I find it increasingly impossible to imagine finding someone that I'd rather be with.

E is still staying with me, and right now he's teaching himself how to juggle. I'm often impatient with him (especially when I first get home from work and I'm tired and drained and don't want to deal with anything) so I'm trying to be tolerant of the constant sound of bean bags dropping to the floor. I might not last much longer.

I keep meaning to blog about work, but I have so much to say that it kind of feels overwhelming. Maybe this weekend I can set aside some time to do it, because my job is interesting, challenging, and fun, and I want to tell you all about it.

caution relationship deconstruction ahead

2007-09-25T09:56:00.000-07:00

I'm on the fence about how appropriate it is to discuss the problems in my relationship with DWE on my blog, but as usual, I seem to be erring on the side of blabbermouthy-ness. It's not like I'm saying anything that I haven't said to him or wouldn't want him to read (he does occasionally look at this blog, so I guess he might read it).

Anyway, when I talked to him on Sunday afternoon, he said that he didn't want to call me when he woke up from his sleep on the couch because he didn't want to wake me up in case I was asleep (at midnight on a Saturday night, because apparently he thinks I'm as lame as he is), and also because he wanted to go straight to bed. I told him that I wasn't asleep, and that if I had been, I would not have been mad. And then I suggested that he consider the number of times that I'd gotten mad at him for calling and waking me up (none, although he's done it a few times in the morning) versus the number of times I've gotten mad at him for not calling (numerous, to say the least). In his defense, if he had called, it would probably not have been the 45-second conversation that he was hoping for, because I would have wanted to blab for at least 5 minutes or so. If he were a more conniving sort, he would call, experience the annoyance of not being able to get me off the phone for 5 or 10 minutes, and then throw that experience back in my face the next time I get mad at him for not calling before he goes to bed. But he's all reasonable and practical, and he doesn't want to prove a point or show that I'm wrong, he just wants to get some sleep.

So yeah, I was overreacting a bit. But it's also very true that the standards for him calling are different because he's gone so much. The phone calls average out to an amount of communication with which I am happy, because there are always a few nights a week like last night where we talk for a good hour or so. And if I imagine how I feel when he does call and wake me up in the morning (not mad, but not much like talking to him, either), it is slightly easier to understand how he could ever not feel like talking to me.

I guess the bottom line is that the logistics of what is essentially a semi-long-distance relationship are difficult, DWE is highly imperfect despite good intentions, and I seem to be particularly needy these days. And of course I should try not to lose sight of how wonderful he is and how hard he tries to make me happy. Nor should I lose sight of the fact that I have lots of wonderful and supportive friends who will tell me that I'm right (very true), that I'm kinda overreacting (also very true), and answer the phone when I call.

In other news, I actually managed to get up before 10 a.m. this morning. Maybe eventually I can have a real life in the mornings before I go to work. I guess coffee and a blog entry are a start.

unpacking and waiting by the phone

2007-09-23T10:50:00.000-07:00

After several days without progress, I did quite a bit of apartment unpacking and setting up last night. The books are all on their shelves now (I'm missing a bunch, and I know some of them are in Bakersfield, but it seems to me that there's at least one whole box of them that should be around here somewhere but doesn't seem to be, which is troubling). My new microwave, which is shiny and red, had been sitting on the floor in the livingroom/bedroom because I lacked the proper extension cord and outlet adapter needed to put it in the kitchen. Having a microwave in the livingroom was fun, but ultimately also annoying, and it's now been moved to its permanent home on top of the refridgerator (I have no counter space, so I have to be creative, and luckily the fridge is kind of short). Note to Rebel: between the microwave and the TV, I officially no longer live like a pioneer. =(

I've also started to put up pictures and knick-knacks, which is perhaps the true indication that this is my new home. Dad's ashes are on the mantle, which is a tad cliched, I guess, but I'm just so excited to have a mantle that I can't help it. Speaking of the mantle, the fireplace has been great. I burn Duraflame logs (or the Pine Mountain brand or the Safeway brand), so there's no effort involved, and it's like instant atmosphere. DWE seemed to like it when he came over on Wednesday and Thursday.

Speaking of which, I'm contemplating the possibility that I'm kind of a lousy girlfriend. Maybe not lousy, but at least sort of unreasonable. He and I talked semi-briefly on the phone a couple of times yesterday, and the last time we talked I told him I'd call him that night. So I did, but he didn't answer. When it got to be 10:45, I called again, and left a message saying that he should call if he hadn't already gone to sleep, and if he had gone to sleep he should have called first. At about midnight I got a text from him saying that he'd fallen asleep on the couch and that he was going to bed, but that we'd talk tomorrow (i.e. today). So I tried calling him back, but of course he'd turned his phone off already. So instead I texted him and said that I appreciated that he sent the text, but that I didn't understand why he didn't call, and it hurts my feelings when he avoids me like that.

In retrospect, I may have been overreacting (and I left him a message to that effect this morning). But really, I don't like it when I've asked him to call and he texts instead. Essentially what he's saying is, "I want you to know that I didn't fall off the face of the earth, but I don't want to talk to you. I don't even want to talk to you long enough to say that I'm too tired to talk." And despite my concilatory voicemail, he hasn't called me back this morning, which is also very irritating to me. Am I just incredibly unreasonably needy? Calling is so little effort, and it obviously makes me very happy, so why can't he do it?

more moving

2007-09-17T08:30:00.000-07:00

No pictures of the apartment yet, partly because I refuse to take pictures while it's still in partially-unpacked disarray, and partly because I just got my camera (well, my sister-in-law's camera that I'm borrowing) from S's place. But the good news is that everything I own, save for some miscellaneous items at my mom's house and the hanging clothes that I forgot to get out of DWE's closet, is now in my new place. I rented a car on Saturday and cleared the rest of my stuff out of my storage unit, then spent the rest of the weekend unpacking and getting things in order. Some observations:

1. The Ford Taurus, which I honestly believe that only rental car companies purchase any more, has the biggest trunk I have ever seen.

2. The laundromat in my neighborhood is really, really nice, especially in contrast to the one near my old apartment. Yes, you lose some charm (no Judge Judy playing on the circa 1983 TV and no sketchy people drinking tall cans of PBR in the corner), but you more than make up for it with cleanliness, plants, a working sink with soap and paper towels, and an actual laundromat employee.

3. High ceilings are awesome, unless you want to hang something from them and you're not very tall.

4. I'm not very tall.

5. My next-door neighbor, who also just moved in, is really cool. She is approximately my age, in her second year of law school, and spent a month this summer in Iraq working with abused women through an NGO. We helped each other move some stuff. I also made E (who is starting his new job today and is staying with me for a while) help her move a dresser, and now he seems a bit smitten with her. So cute.

6. Moving into and setting up an apartment seems much more time consuming when you have a job.

Despite the job, which is still going well, I think I will have everything perfect by the end of the week. And then I promise to take pictures.

(don't go back to) rockridge

2007-09-11T21:57:00.000-07:00

I apologize for the especially long absence (and I know, of course, that the apology is necessary, because clearly your lives are hollow without a fresh dose of my blog). I have an unusually good reason for not posting: I have no internet access. But this is good news, because it means that I have my own apartment.

I got the keys to my new place this past Friday, and I did the bulk of my moving in this weekend, with the help of my ma, who drove up from Bakersfield, and the help of E, who drove down from Santa Rosa, where he is staying with family. I still have a couple of smallish bookcases and many boxes, mostly of books, left in my storage unit, which is paid through the end of the month.

My new apartment is in Rockridge, which is a neighborhood in North Oakland that is a little bit upscale and extremely close to the Oakland-Berkeley border. Rockridge, aptly enough, rocks. I love it. DWE suggested it as a possible place to look for apartments, and the first time I stepped off the BART at the Rockridge station I knew it was where I wanted to live. The main street is College Avenue (which runs north all the way to the Cal Berkeley campus, where it dead-ends), which is lined with great little restaurants and shops. My apartment is a block and a half off of college, and also a block and a half away from the BART station. In five minutes I can walk to two different taquerias, a Chinese restaurant, an oyster bar, a bar and grill, a coffee shop, a pizza joint, and an upscale food market (bakery, artisanal cheeses, etc). There are lots more restaurants a bit farther than that (probably another dozen of them in a fifteen-minute walking radius) along with about every kind of little shop you can think of (clothing, furniture, optometry, hair salon, spa, luggage, sports, bikes, etc).

The temperament of the neighborhood is pretty nicely balanced: there is no Starbucks, but there are also no flocks of dirty hippies. It's not disgustingly yuppy-ish, but it is fairly young, urban, and professional. The neighborhood is primarily houses, so it's lots of families along with the young singles. And I just love the name: Rockridge. Doesn't it sound cool? I may spend the rest of my life with "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" by R.E.M. in my head, but I can deal with that.

My apartment is in a huge Victorian house that was long ago split into eight apartments. Mine is on the first floor, but there's a semi-above ground basement, and the entire house is raised up from the street level, so there are two half-flights of stairs to take to get to my front door, which is on the side of the house. The apartment itself is more or less a very large studio. You enter into a smallish room that I'm using as a foyer/dining room. To the left is the kitchen, which has plenty of room to move around in but woefully little counter space. It does have a gas range though, which kicks ass.

Just beyond the kitchen, I'm a bit sad to say, we come to the bathroom. Yes, they are right next to each other, and you have to walk through the kitchen to get to the bathroom. The bathroom, although it is cute and has fun indigo-blue hexagonal tiles, is probably the least appealing part of the apartment. As T would say, it is wee. Really, really wee. I haven't measured, but eyeballing it, my mom and I are pretty sure that it measures 3' X 5'. Tiny, yes, but you have to be a little impressed that they fit a toilet, a sink, and a shower in that space (and that I further fit a trash can, my bathroom caddy, and a bathmat in said space). If you are a guy, you could stand in the shower and pee in the toilet.

So that's kind of annoying, but it's also one of those things that you get used to really quickly, and it really hasn't bothered me much. There's a weird piece of furniture in the foyer/dining room that came with the apartment (it appears to be part table, part coat rack, and part mirror) that is perfect for doing hair and makeup (added bonus: lots of natural light in the foyer), and there's shelving in the bathroom for extra towels and TP and stuff, so it seems like it will work out fine.

So if you walk straight from the foyer/dining room, you get to the main room, which is about the size of the entirety of my old apartment. My loft bed goes on the far wall, my futon (with new cushion and fancy red microfiber cushion cover) goes on the near wall. The papasan chair goes next to the gorgeous bay windows, which are right across from the working fireplace (you can see now, perhaps, why I don't care so much about the bathroom). The floors are hardwood, and the ceilings are really high (even higher than in my old place, which is a big plus with the loft bed). Things are still in a state of disarray, and I need to buy a coffee table, but once everything is in place, there is going to be a ton of empty floor space, which is sort of my preference.

Anyway, that's the apartment. Pictures will follow, of course. Work is mostly good and very interesting, but that will have to wait for another post.

old lady new job

2007-08-31T16:01:00.000-07:00

I'm not entirely in a blogging mood right now, but I thought I should at least check in, because it's been an eventful week. I turned 29 on Tuesday, and spent a couple of minutes obsessing over my wrinkles in front of the mirror. I know I'm being a little silly, but I am feeling rather old. DWE took me out for dinner and jazz music, which was really lovely and relaxing.

On Monday I started my new job. We spent this week doing training and getting to know each other, and next Tuesday I start teaching students. There are five other new Math Empowerment teachers, all of whom seem really cool (and a couple of whom are young and male and way cute). I think I'm going to like this job quite a bit. It's a very supportive, progressive, and fun work environment, and from what I can tell working with the students will be both challenging and enjoyable.

Speaking of high school students from the greater Oakland area, has anyone ever heard of the slang term "bootsy"? Apparently it's a negative adjective that high school students around here use. Most likely several of my new students will think that math is bootsy.

I'll probably post again later this weekend, but that's all for now.

the other love of my life

2007-08-23T10:40:00.000-07:00

One thing about finding a job relatively quickly (and with shamefully little effort, unless you count worrying and feeling inadequate as putting forth "effort") is that I never got desperate or curious enough to really look for jobs anywhere outside of the Bay Area. Now that I have a job that I'm enthusiastic about, there's essentially no chance that I will be living anywhere but the Bay Area through at least June 2008. I made a conscious decision to move back to SF at the expense of other alternatives (and maybe "move back" isn't even the right phrase, because it still feels like my home as much as it ever did). And there was, quite frankly, only one other alternative: Portland, Oregon.

So here I am in Portland, and if I'm not exactly doubting the haste and blitheness with which I made my decision, I'm at least feeling palpably the costs of that decision. I love it here. It isn't just that I have so many good friends here, or that the weather is pleasing, or that I know the bus system. Those things I knew, and I remembered when I decided not to move back here. The thing I didn't remember was how much I love Portland in the same irrational and wide-eyed way that one loves another person. I just want to stare at Portland for hours. I want to ride over the bridges in Tri-Met buses even if I have no where to go. I want to wander the aisle of the Hawthorne Fred Meyer, and then when I get bored of that, I want to go to the Broadway Fred Meyer. When people mention Modest Mouse or The Decemberists or Matt Groening or Bruce Springsteen's first wife, I want to say, "They're from Portland, because everything great is from Portland, because Portland is the best city in the world." I want to pay $0.99, not $1.07, for something that costs $0.99. I want to go out to Beaverton and go to all the little restaurants we used to go to when I worked at the Employment Department. Then I want to ride the MAX from Beaverton to the airport. But when I get to the airport I don't want to leave.

Alas, I do have to leave, in just a few days. I already made my decision. I chose SF because I was already there, and I have good friends there too. I chose it because in theory it's one of the greatest cities in the world, and in practice I think it's pretty cool. I chose it because the buses are cheaper and run later. And, yeah, mostly I chose it because I have one particular friend there that I could probably stare at for even longer than I could stare at Portland, although he'd almost certainly get creeped out and make me stop.

Other than my hopeless pining away for the city itself, I'm having a really good time. MJ's wedding reception was a great party, and I found myself all emotional that my little girl is a grown-up married lady! She and her hubby (does he have a blog name? I can't remember...) are clearly incredibly happy and incredibly good for each other, so yay! It's been really great to see all of my friends. Everyone seems to have something interesting going on--exciting trips, new and/or growing kids, cool projects and career plans, etc. I'm hoping that despite working almost-full-time, I'll have more chances to come up here and visit (and more importantly, more money to do so).

i got the job!

2007-08-14T16:57:00.000-07:00

I was officially offered and officially accepted a teaching position with the Math Empowerment program at Making Waves. Yay! I start on August 27th, so it will be a nice one-day-early 29th birthday present. I'm a bit overqualified for the position (insofar as I don't need a master's degree to do it, and in theory I'm qualified to do other jobs that pay more), but the work is very appealling, and I will make enough money to survive. In fact, I'm starting at a higher salary than I would have otherwise as a result of my degree (of course, I'm also in a lot of debt as a result of my degree, so there you go).

The next project, then, is to find an apartment. Since I will be working in Richmond, which is over in East Bay, I'm considering living in Berkeley or another BART-adjacent place that might be cheaper than San Francisco. Berkeley isn't exactly cheap, but it's at least potentially cheaper than SF, and my commute would be just about 15 minutes instead of more than an hour (not that I mind a long commute too much...I can always read, listen to music, etc).

Anyway, it's a huge relief to know that I have a job waiting, and it's nice that I don't have to start for another two weeks (especially since I really can't start sooner than the 27th, since I will be in Portland all of next week).

yucky heat, yucky bugs, pretty dress

2007-08-12T17:28:00.000-07:00

Not that I expect anything different in Bakersfield in mid-August, but I feel the need to complain: it is freaking hot. My mother has become much less stingy about the AC, but in the absence of her enforcement, I've developed my own internal sense of guilt about wasting money and resources (see, her brainwashing--I mean upbringing--worked perfectly), so I don't turn it on very often. And quite frankly, the heat isn't very noticeable if you're watching TV with the ceiling fan on, and I do quite a bit of that these days. I'm only whining now because for the past couple days I've actually been working: organizing all the junk in my room, sorting through piles of mail and paperwork, packing up clothing and books to take back up to SF, and doing a few chores for my mother. I'm going to take as much stuff as possible with me on my next trip up to SF, because hopefully I won't be coming back to Bakersfield for a little while, because hopefully I will have a job. I haven't heard from them yet, but they told me they'd get back to me in between a week and a week and a half, and it will have been a week on Tuesday. So it will probably be at least another day or two. I've been really bad in that I haven't been looking for other work, even though it is very possible that I won't get this job. But I suppose if I don't get the job, I will be highly motivated by my lack of income to start looking again.

I'll head up to SF sometime during this coming week, and then on Friday DWE and I will drive up to Oregon to visit people and to attend MJ's wedding reception. I bought a dress today to wear to the reception; it's just a little cotton empire-waisted peasanty-looking thing that I got at Old Navy, but it's cute and it's a really pretty burgandy color and it was on sale for 50%, plus I had a coupon for an extra 20% off my purchase, so it was an absolute steal at $12. (Bonus math question: what was the original price of the dress?) I'd actually tried it on weeks ago in San Diego, and then I'd seen it again in SF, but decided not to buy it both times (which is a sort of shopping-related self-restraint that I usually don't practice). And then they only had two left at the Bakersfield store, and one of them was in my size. Very exciting (well, it was exciting for me, anyway...).

Anyway, poor DWE is in Oregon right now, dealing with the discovery that his house in St. Helens is infested with termites. He said that they are pouring out of the walls like liquid, and that inside the walls (he is starting to tear out walls in the bathroom in order to get to them) there is basically a two-foot-high pile of writhing insects. Apparently many of them are at least two inches long, and more than a few of them can fly. (For those of you who've seen it, I imagine it's a bit like that bug scene in the second Indiana Jones movie.) A friend of his, whom he described to me as "a pretty tough broad" (and I believe it, because she has a bunch of foster kids) ran screaming from the house when she saw them. I told him that I was impressed with how brave he was being, and he pointed out that he doesn't really have much of a choice. I suppose that's at least partially true, but I think most of the time when people are brave it's when they're forced to be, or at least strongly encouraged to be.

Anyway, this is just one more reason that I don't own a home, or a car, or anything else of value other than my iPod and my computer, and my computer isn't even valuable anymore because it turns off for no reason all the time. Which is why I'm using my mother's laptop right now, which is why my mother is looking at me impatiently because she is supposed to be working.

one step closer to no longer being a shiftless drain on society

2007-08-06T11:31:00.001-07:00

I'm still here in partly-cloudy San Francisco, crashing on S's inflatable mattress and watching his Sex and the City DVDs (can I just say that Harry and Charlotte are the most adorable and romantic thing ever?). I've been waiting to hear back from the folks I interviewed with on Wednesday, and they called this morning to set up a second interview, so yay! That presumably means that (1) they liked me and (2) I didn't make a bunch of stupid mistakes on the math test I had to take as part of the first interview. I'm irrationally happy about having done well on what was generally a very easy test; maybe it's because I've been scarred by my hopelessly mediocre performances on the GRE math section, but I was very worried about messing up.

Yesterday I bought a new iPod (the old one, which was on its last leg anyway, was among the items stolen in Ghana). I'd decided a few weeks ago on the red 8 GB Nano, but I was debating whether to buy it at a store or order it online so that I could get free engraving on the back. In the end, I couldn't think of anything I really wanted engraved on the back of my iPod, so I opted for the instant gratification of in-store purchase. I also bought a nice case for it as part of my attempt to maintain this iPod a little more carefully than my old one (although, for all it's many scratches, dropping incidents, and minor problems, that iPod lasted an impressive amount of time).

I'm off on another shopping trip this afternoon, since I only brought one interview outfit with me to SF. I was going to wear my suit pants again with a different top, but I accidentally left my suit hanging in DWE's closet, and he is in D.C. at the moment. I suppose since I'm (hopefully) entering the grown-up working world again, it wouldn't hurt to invest in some more dress pants.

my recent whereabouts + cruising eharmony

2007-08-01T15:13:00.000-07:00

I think that I have emerged from the worst of my post-Ghana malaise, and I feel like communicating again. Yay.

The last two weeks have not been terribly exciting, but here are the highlights anyway. I got a new driver license (I don't know if you've noticed, but in California at least, it's actually called a "driver license" rather than a "driver's license") with a new picture on it (thank God, since the old picture was from 1997). Amazingly, the new picture is actually really good. I dare say I look slightly glamorous. Monday of last week I took Amtrak down to San Diego to visit DWE, then stopped in L.A. to visit Muffin on my way back. This past Monday my mom had a minor-ish medical procedure, so I tended to her for a bit. Last night I took the train up to San Francisco, and this morning I had an interview in Richmond (which is in East Bay sort of near Berkeley) for a position with a non-profit teaching math to disadvantaged high school students. I think the interview (and the math test I had to take afterwards) went well, and I will find out by the end of the week if I get to continue to the second round of interviews. I would be ecstatic if I got this job, partly because I really want it, and partly because I would love it if I didn't have to look for a job anymore (not that I'm looking that hard right now...I should be but I'm not).

Other than my flitting around the state and sort of job hunting, I've been reading a little, watching TV a lot, and trying to find novel ways to entertain myself. For example, I'm currently conducting an experiment to see if DWE and I are "scientifically" compatible. The website eharmony.com will now let you complete your profile AND see your matches without having to pay (I know this because I've seen the commercial a zillion times), so I signed myself up and took their exhaustive personality test. I also forced DWE--under more than a little duress--to also sign up and fill out the personality profile (basically I commandeered his laptop and refused to do anything else until he answered all of the questions). We've been getting matched up with people for a week now, but have still not been matched up with each other. As far as I can tell, there's no technical reason that we shouldn't get matched up: we both said we live in SF, we're both in each other's acceptable age-ranges, etc. Apparently we just aren't compatible on Dr. Neil Clark Warren's 29 Key Dimensions of Compatibility. So I broke up with him. Dude, it's science. You can't argue with science.

Just kidding, of course. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we haven't been matched, but I sort of am, because I think of him and I as being very compatible. I sort of wonder how much of the matching is based on similarities vs. opposite-but-complementary traits; for example, DWE and I are polar opposites when it comes to expressing our feelings (I do it compulsively, he avoids it almost entirely), but it works out: he's a tireless listener, and I can usually intuit what he's feeling without him having to verbalize it.

Perhaps their whole matching system is bullshit. Or, more likely, perhaps it works for some people and not for others (my sister-in-law observed rather keenly, after I explained the site's exhaustive process, that perhaps it brings together people who love answering questions). I can see the appeal of "deep compatibility", but I also think it might be a bit overrated. Yeah, I want DWE to "understand" me, and in some ways he does (in other ways he doesn't, but there are generally other people in my life that understand me in those ways). But I think there's a lot to be said for practicality, too. We may not be "scientifically" compatible, but check this out: he has hereditary hearing loss, so while the rest of the world finds me loud and obnoxious, he thinks that I speak at a reasonable volume. It's like we were made for each other. (Because love means never having to say "You don't have to yell, I'm standing right here").

On the plus side, there seem to be a lot of nice, intelligent, single men in their early thirties in the Bay Area, so maybe if DWE ever dumps me I'll try it out for real.

how to flee a foreign country on short notice

2007-07-15T06:01:00.000-07:00

I made it home. I arrived at Meadows Field, Bakersfield's illustrious airport, at around 1:30 a.m. on Friday night/Saturday morning. My checked bag did not make it yet (and my cell phone charger is in my checked bag, so if you call me and I don't answer that's why).

The mildly amusing (and long--be warned) little tale of my "escape" from Ghana begins this past Monday, when I arrived at the US embassy in Accra to start the process of getting a new passport. The embassy recently moved to a new building (or, really, series of buildings in a large, fenced in area), and being there was truly eerie. It looked, smelled, and felt like being in the United States; it was the cleanest, quietest, most modern place I went to in Ghana. (I'm sure it wasn't the cleanest, quietest, most modern place in Ghana, but it was certainly atypical of my other experiences.) After going through security, I was directed to a long, somewhat narrow hall lined with a series of 13 windows at which embassy staff assisted people from behind thick security glass (with a little speaker so that you could hear them and one of those metal basins through which paperwork could be exchanged). The rest of the hall was lined with chairs and dozens of people waiting for their names to be called. 11 of the windows were for non-citizens; it appeared, from what I could tell, to be mostly Ghanaians seeking (and being rejected for) travel visas to the United States. Not to digress too much, but it was really fascinating and sad to watch. I'm not sure how the whole process works, but it was fairly clear that people had applied and then been assigned a day and time to come to the embassy regarding their application (how long it took or whether it was necessary to come more than once I don't know). I could tell that most of the people there had dressed up in their Sunday best and marshaled armfuls of potentially-relevant paperwork, most of which wasn't looked at during their brief stays at the windows. There was an embassy worker at window 10 with a loud voice, so I could overhear some of her rejections one of the days that I was there. My impression is that you have to have a compelling reason to want to come to the US, but not a compelling reason to want to stay there; even more important, you have to have strong financial ties to Ghana, presumably so that they believe you'll come back. Of course, if you're poor, you don't have strong financial ties anywhere. And so you don't get to come to the US.

Anyway, we can discuss US immigration policy another day. Windows 12 and 13 at the embassy are for US citizens. I was seen within about 15 minutes by a very kind woman, who explained to me the process for having a stolen passport replaced. You have to submit two forms, one passport photo, a police report regarding the theft, and fees totaling $97 (I also gave them a copy of my old passport, which I think greatly assists the process). I actually had a passport photo handy (I brought an extra one with me to Ghana after that whole deal in India last summer where I needed one to get a freakin' cell phone), but I didn't have a police report. (Not for lack of trying to get one--I went to the Cape Coast police station twice, but they were completely unhelpful, a story which I will tell in more detail at some point.) The woman told me where police headquarters is in Accra, and suggested that I get a report there and then come back and submit everything. At this point I'm thinking, cool, I can do this, this is all pretty easy. I'll have my new passport in no time. And then I asked how long it takes to get the new passport. At least 2 weeks, she told me. Honestly, I don't know why I was expecting it to be less, but I was. They send everything to the US and the new passport is processed here and sent back to Ghana, which is not surprising. It makes sense that it takes 2 weeks, I just wasn't prepared for that reality.

So when she said 2 weeks, I freaked out a little (okay, a lot). I burst into tears, and I got a little hysterical. I can't remember exactly what I said, but I know I was crying pretty hard and saying stuff like, "I can't stay here for 2 more weeks. I just want to go home." It must have been quite a show for the Ghanaians (and Americans) within earshot. There were 2 women helping me at this point, and they were both really sweet. There had me go into the interview room at the end of the hall, which is just another window, but it's in a room, so I was able to finish my little breakdown in privacy while the second woman, who's name was Grace, talked to me. She said she'd see what she could do, and that in the meantime I should go get the police report. So I left and went to the police headquarters, resigning myself miserably to the fact that I'd be there for 2 more weeks. An incredibly kind and helpful detective wrote up an official police report detailing the mugging incident, and did so in just over an hour, which is like light speed in Ghana. I had to go to an ATM afterwards to get cash to pay the fee, and of course at the bank I went to the ATM was temporarily out of service because they were refilling it with money. Five minutes, the guard said. Okay, will it really only be five minutes? I asked him, because I have to get back to the embassy before they close at noon. He said yes. 15 minutes later, after I've explained to him why I'm in a hurry and he's told me a few times that they are "almost done", he starts telling me where another bank is. I flipped out a little and asked him why he said "five minutes" when he didn't mean it, and he just started laughing, which made me more angry, which made him laugh more. But then finally they did finish, and I got some money.

Meanwhile, Grace, my embassy angel of mercy, had done some pleading on my behalf. I guess if you freak out in the embassy you seem a little crazy and unstable, and I guess that's considered a compelling reason that you need to go home sooner rather than later, because she explained my situation to whomever makes these decisions, and I was granted an Emergency Passport. I almost started crying again when she told me that I could go home as soon as I wanted. The only other thing I had to do in order to get the emergency passport was submit a copy of my ticket home, which of course I didn't have yet, because I hadn't changed it from the original date, because I was waiting to see how long the passport would take. So Grace told me I could change my ticket to Friday (which was when I was hoping to come home) and bring in a copy of the e-ticket the next morning.

I won't go into all the drama of changing my ticket (or getting a new ticket, which is what actually happened) except to say that my mother and DWE are wonderful people who are way nicer to me than I deserve. My mother paid more than she should have had to in order to get me home, and DWE very generously and thoughtfully used a pile of frequent flier miles to upgrade me to business class for my flight from Accra to New York (I'd never flown business class before, and dude, it rocks).

My emergency passport (which they made in Ghana, of course) looks normal on the outside, and sort of normal on the inside, but it has a little message about how it's just an emergency one and it expires on July 9, 2008 (I have to send away for a permanent one before that). When I was leaving Ghana, the customs guy told me (in a rather self-satisfied manner, I couldn't help noticing) that my passport was expired. He seemed a little disappointed when I pointed out the "2008" to him.

Anyway, I'm home. I'm not sure if I really "deserved" an emergency passport, and I still don't quite know how I feel about the fact that I left at all (other than to know that I'm very happy to be home). My experience in Ghana was more negative than positive, and I regret that, but I suppose that's bound to happen sometimes. Enjoying travel doesn't mean that every travel experience is going to be a good one.

not much new

2007-07-06T12:07:00.000-07:00

This post probably won't be informative in any significant way, other than to assert that things are still fine, all things considered. I am in Accra this weekend and will go to the embassy on Monday morning to get the ball rolling on my new passport. Hopefully it will be ready by Friday (a week from today) because I'm hoping to fly out of here on Friday or Saturday. In theory I'm still doing one or two minor things for my adviser, but other than that I'm just hanging around trying to get things in order and not be too much of an emotional drag on Al or Mel. We're staying with a Ghanaian family this weekend in Accra (the family of the 3rd IDEC student working with Al and Mel), so that will give me a chance to try a couple of the traditional dishes I haven't had yet and attempt to leave this place with some semblance of a positive attitude.

I appreciate how sweet and supportive you all have been, and getting to see everyone sooner is a nice consolation in an otherwise crappy situation (how soon, I don't know...I'm going to want to stay put for a little bit, even if it's in Bakersfield, and then who knows how long until my mother lets me out of her sight again).

pictures

2007-06-29T07:17:00.000-07:00

As I'd hoped, I found an internet cafe in Cape Coast that is fast and still pretty cheap. It is cooler here and there are some neat castles from the colonial period (mostly built by the Dutch, I think), and of course it is great to be by the water. Cape Coast is west of Accra and southwest of Kumasi. It took us about 4 hours to get here, which isn't bad for Ghana.

Unfortunately, I'm feeling truly awful at the moment, so all I have the energy for is posting a bunch of pictures.Here is your monkey, J.J. Sorry it's not closer-up. I have some better ones (and this one is better when you zoom in), but this is a monkey grooming a smaller monkey on the roof of someone's house.

When the monkies die, they bury them and do a ceremony that involves pouring a bottle of schnapps on the grave. There was a whole graveyard.

This is outside of Techiman, on the way to the monkey place. Ghana is very green.

I tried very hard to memorize the name of this lake, and I think I've forgotten it already. It is near one of the borrowing communities I visited. It is very large and very beautiful, and lots of people fish there. I haven't seen much fishing here on the coast so far (but I'm sure there is some around here somewhere).

Okay, so at the lake, they sold fish in baskets. Whole fish, apparently deep-fried. I was with a driver and a loan officer from OI, and they were all about eating these fish. You eat the whole damn thing: head, tail, bones, everything. Here is the head of a fish that I was eating. I ate this head right after I took the picture. Then I thought I was going to throw up, but the feeling passed, fortunately.

This is in Kumasi, near where I will be surveying. This is sort of what Africa looks like.

If I feel better tomorrow, I will post more. For now it's back to the guesthouse.

obruni

2007-06-27T10:07:00.000-07:00

One day soon I will write a serious, economics-related post about how the research is going. The short answer is pretty well but not without several annoying issues. I know that once I am surveying things will be routine and somewhat easier, but there are quite a few steps before I get to that point, and every other step seems to be "panic".

In general, things are going well, though. I like Kumasi and am slowly learning my way around. Mel and Al are great to have around, and Al is a fun roommate. I tried some goat the other day and it was pretty good. Mostly I eat chicken, rice, bits of salad, and random street food (my favorites include a hardboiled egg, fried pastry filled with egg, baked pastry filled with a thin layer of mystery meat, some weird but good half-frozen vanilla yogurt that comes in a bag, or an ear of boiled corn). They have something called jollof rice that is a bit like spanish rice and is pretty yummy. I've learned a few words of Twe (pronounced kind of like "tree") and people seem to always crack up when I say "medasi" (thank you) as thought it is incomprehensible that an obruni would know that word ("obruni" means white person, and we get it quite a bit).

For some reason I miss people a lot this trip: family, friends, dwe, etc. I don't miss the comforts or modernity of the US very much (especially since the heat here is very bearable), but I miss the US insofar as it is my home. I suppose that's a good thing. Anyway, I have many pictures, and will try to upload them this weekend while I'm in Cape Coast with a (hopefully) faster connection.

everybody loves monkeys

2007-06-23T12:53:00.000-07:00

We're in a town called Techiman right now, which is three hours north of Kumasi and near a monkey sanctuary and also some waterfalls. We saw the monkeys today (as well as a lot of really cool trees) and will possibly go to the waterfalls tomorrow (although I might stay here and work; the internet cafe here actually has a faster connection than the one in Kumasi). I will post pictures when I get a chance to do some uploading, and who knows when that will be.

Things are going well, but I'm a bit behind on work. I didn't do much on Thursday (other than a very productive meeting with OI's marketing people in the morning) because I wasn't feeling well, and Friday I spent the morning with Mel and Al (the two female IDEC students who are also here; obviously those aren't their full names) while they went out and surveyed a borrower group in a rural area outside Kumasi, then the afternoon we were in transit to Techiman. JP has made a bunch of revisions to the survey that I need to look at, and then I have some more revisions of my own to make (things specific to Ghana, mostly). Next week I'm scheduled to visit several different areas where OI gives loans to choose one in which to do my surveying. I've been feeling very stressed out about how everything is going to work out, but I'm starting to envision how the process will work a little more clearly, and I'm feeling a bit better. More details in a later post.

Oh, and here's another charming anecdote about the fascinating cultural differences between the US and Ghana: I was with Mel, Al, and Mel's boyfriend at the monkey sanctuary today, and our tour guide asked me if I was their mother (they are 23, 23, and 27). I was shocked and said no, and asked the guide how old he thought I was. He said in my 40s. When I told him my actual age, he explained that I look older because I am fat. The reason for this is not entirely clear to me: although here, as in the US, many older people tend to carry a bit of extra weight, there are some chubby young people, too (not as many as in the US, I suppose). And I know that it's sometimes hard to tell how old people of other, unfamiliar races are. But I don't so much love being called old and fat in the same sentence (I don't really hate it, either; I guess it just comes with the territory).

off to kumasi

2007-06-19T04:25:00.000-07:00

I'm in the OI office again today, partly to take care of a few last details but mostly for free internet and AC. This afternoon I will leave for Kumasi. Yay! I'm not sure why I'm so convinced that everything will be better once I get to Kumasi. I'm really looking forward to seeing my fellow IDECers. I also very much want to start getting "settled in" and start some kind of a routine, and it doesn't make much sense to start one here when I'm going to be spending the summer in Kumasi.

Because I know you're just dying to know: Kumasi is the second largest city in Ghana (after Accra, of course) with a population of approximately 1 million. It is inland, so it's probably a bit warmer (which is okay because the heat here in Accra really hasn't been that bad, compared to what I'd imagined). Kumasi is the old capital of the Ashanti region; the Ashanti (or Asante) are the largest native group in Ghana and fought several wars with the British until they were incorporated into the Gold Coast colony in the late 1800s (I hope I'm remembering these details correctly...the history of Ghana that I'm reading is informative but not exactly scintillating). The Ashanti language is called Twe, and I believe it is the most commonly spoken language after English. (Random side note...Ghana is approximately the same size, but a bit smaller than, Oregon.)

the fussy details of survey formatting

2007-06-18T08:48:00.000-07:00

I've been in the OI office most of the day, and while I'm waiting for various people to finish meetings so that they can meet with me, I've passed my time by rewriting our survey from it's rough draft in Word into something more formal in Excel. After my experience last year, I'm much more aware of the differences between how something looks on the screen and on the page, not to mention the importance of the order in which questions are organized or how close together they are to one another. I'm trying to make this survey far more user-friendly and easily-read than the one that we used last year in India. For the most part the changes are straightforward (I'm increasing font sizes and leaving larger spaces for answers), but it's sometimes tricky to decide whether or not to create a chart or to break a question up into parts or to just restate it more than once (and I should say that JP, who co-wrote the survey and will be using it in Chennai, has been very good at figuring out ways to state things clearly). Questions that involve a second and third "if yes, then blah blah blah..." question are particularly annoying to me. It's important that the initial question is answered clearly yes or no, because sometimes the enumerator will fill out the answers to subsequent questions even when they aren't applicable, which then can present a whole mess of confusion.

You might be wondering if there isn't some professional standard that I could be following in this situation. Well, sort of. Our survey questions themselves are loosely based on the LSMS, which is the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study. This is an exhaustive series of survey modules asking about pretty much everything you can ever imagine wanting to ask a household in a developing country. The thing about the LSMS, however, is that it is insanely long and complicated, and the questionnaires themselves are designed to be administered and filled out by professionals. Also, the LSMS does pretty much all of the coding within the survey (i.e. if the person gives this answer, you put a 1, if they give this answer, you put a 2, etc), which, while making the answers shorter, adds to the complexity of the layout (and the length of the explanatory text). (My survey won't involve very much complicated coding, because it's mostly quantifiables and yes or no questions, and all of the coding will be done by me when I enter the data.) The bottom line is that the LSMS is not even remotely user-friendly, so it's not much of a model for me in that respect.

it's not the 3rd world unless someone calls me fat

2007-06-17T10:12:00.000-07:00

I admit that I'm not doing so well with the jet lag. I slept quite late this afternoon again, which doesn't matter much because it's Sunday, but is unhelpful nonetheless. Still no cell phone, but after I'm done here I'm going to go see about one that I looked at yesterday. I told the guy that was trying to sell it to me that I needed to go eat, and he gestured to my stomach and said that Americans already eat enough, that we have too much food and are too fat, no? I agreed with him, but said that I hadn't eaten all day, and therefore I was going to have dinner regardless of the state of my own stomach or the stomach of collective Americans.

Earlier I was walking with a gentleman who had befriended me (okay, accosted me) on the street, and he was saying that it was hard for white people to walk around because everyone wants to talk to them or sell them something. I told him I was used to it because it was the exact same way in India. Something about that statement felt inappropriate to me, as though I were saying, "yeah, you know, poor countries where the people have darker skintones...they're all the same...they all harass me because I'm so rich and white, but gee, I've learned to deal with it." As much as I like travelling, I don't think I'll ever be comfortable with the inherent social dynamics.

Back to the cheap cell phone hunt.

in accra

2007-06-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

Well, here I am. I've been in Accra for not quite 2 days now, but I have nothing terribly exciting to report yet. My bag didn't make it on my flight, so I had to spend several hours at the airport last night waiting for it to come in (which it did, thank goodness). The place I'm staying is expensive (there aren't really any cheap places to stay here, and the ones that are cheap are all booked), but it has AC and a TV that gets some kind of global version of CNN, so at least I'm being spoiled. I'm trying very unsuccessfully to get over my jet lag. I slept for much of yesterday afternoon, and then I went to bed for the night at 1 a.m., woke up at 4:30 a.m., finally got back to sleep and then accidentally slept until 3:30 p.m. today. Oh well. I've only eaten one meal since I got here (dinner last night...and I will eat again very soon, because I'm very hungry), but it was good. I was unadventurous and got fried rice at the restaurant next to my hotel, which was very good and not particularly exotic. I also drank two bottles of something called Sahara Dry Cider, which was very good. Yay, African hard cider!

Some initial observations/anecdotes about Ghana:

The heat is really bearable so far (and not just because I have AC in my room). I think it might be worse in Kumasi.
Accra is cleaner and less crowded than Chennai was, and fewer people randomly harass you on the street.
The people that do harass you, however, often say "hello" using the exact same tone and inflection as the Indians did, as though it's the only word of English they know, which in this country it certainly isn't.
Most people seem to speak English, but there are also other languages being spoken (often by the same people...presumably they are speaking the tribal languages I've read about) and I think maybe there's a modified version of English being spoken. People certainly have accents and aren't always readily understandable.
I have seen almost no overtly homeless people.
One of my cab drivers told me he wanted to marry a white woman. I told him that I was sorry, but that I'm spoken for, and he said, "no, I don't want to marry you." But he gave me his number and wanted me to hook him up with one of my American friends. All I know about him: he's 28, his name is Emmanuel, and he can drive.

Anyway, I need to go see about buying a cell phone before the stores close. More soon, of course. Internet is cheap and only sort of slow.

imminent departure

2007-06-12T23:02:00.000-07:00

I'm currently in LA, at Casa de Muffin (well, actually, Casa de Muffin's boyfriend, who is a truly lovely person that I'm very excited to have gotten to meet finally). As I mentioned, Muffin is leaving on the train with the rest of the Dreams Across America people tomorrow, so he is running around dealing with last minute stuff, much the way I had been until I left Bakersfield earlier today (except there's far more equipment and logistical pre-planning involved in filmmaking than in economics).

Of course I feel as though there should be something noteworthy about my last night in the U.S. for a bit. And there is, insofar as I haven't seen Muffin in forever, it's great to meet his boyfriend, I just drank a really good martini, etc. But leaving is, as usual, deceptively mundane. I don't know what Ghana will be like, but I can guess; I don't know what will change while I'm gone, but probably not much.

I don't think I'd do very well writing a travel memior. I don't seem to be able to imbue the proper moments with the proper meaning. Maybe the juices will start flowing once I get on the plane (not that I'm trying to write a travel memoir, but I feel that things should be mildly more interesting than this).

Unless LAX got free WiFi while I wasn't noticing, my next dispatch will be from Accra...

monochromorama

2007-06-12T09:18:00.000-07:00

Okay, so my blog was ugly. Green and red and indigo don't go together. I want to get rid of the green because I'm sick of it, but I can't find something I like better, so right now we're all monochromatic with some purple. I'll keep playing with it to see what I like.

dreams across america

2007-06-10T20:39:00.000-07:00

Since I'm flying out of LAX on Wednesday afternoon, I'm having Ma drive me down to LA the night before so that I can have a quick but long-overdue visit with Muffin before I leave. He's been living in LA for over a year now, working in various capacities as an editor and documentary filmmaker. I wanted to give a little plug for the project he's working on right now because I think it's pretty interesting and I'm really proud of the work that he's doing.

He is currently doing short documentary films and interviews, as well as a bunch of other related logistical stuff, for a pro-immigration project called Dreams Across America. The same day I leave for Ghana, they are leaving on a cross-country train ride to raise awareness and dispell misinformation about immigration and its effects on American society (which is of course a really interesting and complex issue with a lot of economic implications, but that's beyond the scope of this particular post). Many of the videos on the website were done by Muffin and/or his film partner (I'm pretty sure he did most of the ones with white backgrounds--he also did the one of Cardinal Mahoney on page 14 of the video section). I think it's really cool that he's been able to work doing the thing that he wants to be doing (filmmaking) and I know that he is learning a great deal.

vegas

2007-06-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

Ma and I arrived back from Las Vegas earlier this evening. My ma got the trip as a gift from her company after working there for 20 years. We stayed in a really beautiful suite on the 25th floor of the Venetian. It had three flatscreen TVs, including one in the bathroom. We went for a gondala ride, went shopping, had massages, and ate yummy food. Not as exciting as actually being in Italy, like E is right now, but still pretty cool. We only explored the strip a little bit (The Venetian is huge, so we hardly felt the need to leave) and spent all of five minutes gambling (me: video blackjack, net winnings of negative 50 cents; Ma: video poker, net winnings of a whopping $8 resulting from a four of a kind). Our favorite place was the pool deck on the fourth floor, which was like a big garden with a couple of pools, grassy areas (well, fake grass, but it looked real) with chaise lounge chairs, a bar, and restaurant with patio seating.

The weekend was fun, despite my lingering backache from moving. Tomorrow I'll be doing laundry and running a couple last minute errands, and then we're going out to celebrate my brother and sister-in-law's one-year wedding anniversary.

moved out

2007-06-09T08:37:00.000-07:00

I am officially no longer a resident of San Francisco. The majority of my stuff is stacked up in a 5' by 10' storage space in SoMa (and I have to say that N was right when he said that you'd be surprised how much fits in a storage unit--I had no problem fitting dozens and dozens of boxes, two bed frames, a full-size mattress, three book shelves, a futon frame, a papazan frame and cushion, my dining room table, and various other miscellaneous items). I also have some stuff both at DWE's house and my ma's house, mostly clothes and some other things that I didn't want to put in storage (poor DWE asked to borrow my Simpsons DVDs and managed to get saddled with all of my DVDs and the media shelf that they're stored in).

Moving was a somewhat stressful experience because, as usual, I had more stuff than I thought and I wasn't as well-packed as I thought. I rented an SUV (the Ford Edge--nice handling, but worst gas mileage ever) on Monday morning and took two loads of stuff to my storage space on my own, which was tiring but not too bad (carrying stuff down the stairs is definitely easier than the alternative). On Tuesday morning I took a second load to storage, then DWE helped me in the afternoon and we took all the big stuff over. The storage unit closes at 6 p.m., so I spent Tuesday evening frantically finishing packing all the random crap still left in my apartment (and there was quite a bit of it) so that I could do an early-morning storage unit run before I had to return my rental car. DWE was driving down to San Diego on Wednesday evening, so he drove me to Bakersfield with the last of my stuff. Although I did a lot of the moving myself, DWE was extremely helpful, especially at the end when I was panicking and sore and tired of going up and down stairs. In addition to being really patient with me, he worked really hard and tirelessly carried stuff while I finished packing and dealt with move-out paperwork and stuff. Of course, DWE is just one in a long line of helpful and tireless friends who have helped me move over the years (as many of you know because you are those helpful and tireless people).

My ma and I are in Vegas right now for the weekend, which I will tell you all about in a later post. For now I have to go shower because we're getting massages at 10:30. I'll also provide an update on Ghana stuff soon (just 4 days until I leave!).

fabric softener

2007-06-03T22:47:00.000-07:00

Intelligent as my mother is, she occasionally seems to be quite easily addled by what I consider to be simple tasks, like booking an airline flight online or differentiating between similar products in the grocery store. I've noticed this trait, to varying degrees, in many people who are older than I am, and I always privately snicker at it a bit.

So maybe the following anecdote is divine retribution for that snickering.

I was on the phone with DWE earlier today, and I was telling him that I was going to be giving him some stuff, like miscellaneous food products, dish soap, detergent, etc. As I was saying this I was standing at my counter, where my laundry detergent has been sitting for at least a week. It is Method brand detergent, which you may be familiar with if you shop at Target. I like that brand because it is ultra-concentrated, so the bottle is comparatively small and light. I actually bought the bottle I have now while I was with DWE; I remember because I consulted him on the scent ("It smells like yuppies"). Anyway, I was on the phone, and I was looking at the label of the bottle, and I noticed something that I had never noticed before. Right underneath where it says "Method" on the bottle, it says "Fabric Softener." Nowhere on the bottle does it say "Detergent" or "Laundry Soap." Do you know why? Because it's not soap! It's fabric softener! Yes, I have been washing my clothes for at least two months now using nothing but fabric softener (well, and water).

I admit that I freaked out a little bit. ("All my clothes are dirty! I've been wearing dirty clothes for months! Oh my God! All my underwear is dirty! I'm wearing dirty underwear!") DWE was helpful and showed admirable restraint in making fun of me (which is not to say that he didn't make fun of me, just to say that he could have made much more fun of me). He reassured me that my clothes don't smell bad and that a piece of fabric can get reasonably clean just by being agitated and rinsed for half an hour in a washing machine. He also reminded me that there are lots of people in the world that probably don't wash their clothes with soap (or at least not nearly as often as Americans do).

Anyway, I can't believe I bought fabric softener instead of soap. Except I sort of can believe it, because the bottles are the exact same shape and were no doubt right next to each other on the shelf, and the words "fabric softener" are not huge, as you can see below:

On the other hand, the words aren't exactly tiny, either. I think part of the problem is that I wanted to get a different scent than I had gotten the last time, and in retrospect I'm not sure if they actually had a different scent in the detergent. I just saw a bottle next to what I'd gotten the last time that was the same size and shape but a different, more appealing-sounding scent. And then once I bought the bottle I didn't ever read it.

So now I'm fascinated by the fact that had I not happened to be looking at the bottle carefully today, I could have never known that I spent months washing my clothes without soap. My clothes smell fine (very good, in fact), and don't seem unclean in any way. Why should I even use soap? How do I know that "soap" is getting my clothes clean when I can't even tell when I stop using it?

That said, I will be purchasing laundry soap tomorrow so that I can wash my sheets and towels before I pack them.

packin' and stuff

2007-06-01T13:32:00.000-07:00

DWE finally left town for a few days, so I've been a bit more productive on the packing front. I packed up a crapload of stuff last night. (Little-known fact: "crapload" is actually a technical packing term. One crapload equals approximately 8 medium-sized boxes, one piece of luggage and two large shopping bags full of unwanted items to be donated.) I looked up storage units online last night and will probably go rent one today. The actual moving of the stuff will begin on Monday. I'm mildly concerned about figuring out how to take apart my bed, especially since I didn't put it together, but they say it's easier to destroy than to create, right?

I also have some Ghana business that I've been shirking (looking over the revised survey draft, doing some more paperwork for the school, etc), so I suppose I should get to that stuff. For some reason I'm not doing so well with the multi-tasking these days. I guess you can't really multi-task while packing, unless you count watching a DVD. And I'm sort of looking around my disheveled apartment trying to decide what to pack next as I write this, so maybe that counts too.

measurement issues

2007-06-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

Martin Ravallion, who is a senior researcher on anti-poverty policies at the World Bank, has (along with others) identified three major issues which can stymie anti-poverty program evaluation. Selection bias, which I discussed in my last post, is probably of greatest concern in the microfinance context, but there are also spillover effects and measurement problems. Spillover effects occur when the program being evaluated has a positive impact on not just its recipients but also, to some degree, on adjacent non-recipients. (Here's a trivial but hopefully intuitive example: there is a program targeted toward someone who owns a bar. The program results in the bar's business improving. The owner of the all-night pizza joint next door, who did not have access to the program, also sees an improvement in business as the result of all those drunk people next door. Now imagine that the bar owner is in your treatment group and the pizza-joint owner in your control group, and that you can't necessarily see the connection between the two, and try to figure out what, if any, the impact of your program is.)

And then there are measurement problems, which were brought up in the comments of my last post. One of the central issues here is that it is extremely common for the "businesses" run by microfinance clients to be very small and very, very informal. Not only is it unlikely that they keep records, it is unlikely that if you asked them you could get a consistently accurate answer to the question "what are your average weekly profits?" or even "what were your profits last week?" The finances of the business are often just too intermeshed with the finances of the household, and borrowers have no reason to keep track of profits because they don't necessarily pay taxes on business earning specifically (or perhaps on any earnings at all).

It is the case that some MFIs do trainings and counseling sessions to encourage microentrepreneurs to determine this type of information, which is logical insofar as you want to know something about the business prospects of the business you are lending to. In India I asked about weekly profits, and I also got information from IMED on profits, but the two almost never matched up very well for an individual borrower. Which leads me to another point, which is that the MFI's records may not even be that great, even if the organization is in general pretty well-run.

Some microfinance clients do have slightly larger business and keep better records, and there has been research done in which economists were able to gather the data necessary to estimate an actual profit function in order to look at how microfinance affects the microenterprise in a more formal way. But these borrowers tend, of course, to be a bit less poor, which is great for them, but doesn't yield information that is necessarily applicable to very poor people (this is actually a concern with all microfinance: many people argue that the loans just don't go to the "poorest of the poor" and that therefore microfinance isn't exactly the poverty cure-all that some people make it out to be).

Of course all of this says nothing about being able to study the effects of microfinance on something other than the borrower's business, such as nutrition or household wealth (both of which are covered in my survey). You can ask someone how long they've had a TV or running water, of course, but it's much harder to ask them about their eating habits or smaller-item spending patterns going back into the past.

encouragement design

2007-05-28T17:44:00.000-07:00

I want to spend a little time explaining the basic idea behind the research that I'll be doing while I'm in Ghana. As you probably know, the overall idea is to examine the impact that microfinance loans have on the well-being of the borrowers and their households, with "well-being" measured in a variety of ways (many of which I will get into in a later post).

A central problem with measuring the imact of microfinance (or, to some extent, any anti-poverty program) is that you have to find a way to isolate the effect of the program itself so that you don't ascribe good (or bad) outcomes to the presence of a loan when they are in fact the result of something else. The classic example from microfinance is selection bias. Most microfinance borrowers run very small, informal businesses ("microenterprises" in the development lingo), but of course some people are better entrepreneurs than others, and as a result some people will be more successful than others. It's pretty easy to imagine, furthermore, that someone with good entrepreneurial skills might be systematically more likely to seek out a microfinance loan (because they're more ambitious, resourceful, willing to take risks, etc). Therefore microfinance might appear to make businesses more successful, when in fact all that you're seeing is that successful people are more likely to have microfinance. It could also be the case, on the other hand, that people who have experienced random bad outcomes ("negative shocks" in the lingo) might be more likely to seek out microfinance, so microfinance could appear to have no impact or negative impacts simply because many of the people who got loans were worse off to begin with.

The bottom line is that you can't compare borrowers to non-borrowers and see who is doing better and ascribe what you find to microfinance, because there is no reason to think that microfinance clients have the same characteristics (and therefore the same average outcomes) as non-clients. There are several different ways to get around this (my thesis, for example, looked at outcomes for individual borrowers before and after credit, rather than comparing borrowers to non-borrowers), but probably the best way is to do a randomized field experiment. What this would mean in a perfect world is that you have randomly assigned treatment and a control groups, with both groups consisting of microentrepreneurs who want and are eligible for microfinance. The treatment group get loans, the control group doesn't. The problem, obviously, is that you have to identify a bunch of new borrowers, but then randomly deny half of them credit for a period of time. Although that kind of control group methodology is common in, say, clinical drug trials, you can see how it might be logistically difficult to manage with microfinance loans (especially when an area has more than one MFI, so that control-group members could potentially seek loans elsewhere) and how MFIs might be wary on ethical grounds.

What my advisor is attempting, in Ghana and in India (with myself and my fellow IDECer JP as his research assistants, since he's not actually going to either of those places this summer), is a more feasible iteration of a randomized field experiment. It uses the concept of an instrumental variable, which is basically a way of measuring a causal relationship indirectly so as to subvert some of the bias problems that may be inherent in that relationship. In the microfinance context, we want an instrumental variable that is strongly correlated with receiving a microfinance loan, but has absolutely nothing to do with whatever positive outcomes we expect microfinance to cause.

In this case, what I will be doing is creating random treatment and control groups of microfinance-eligible microentrepreneurs who aren't currently MFI clients. The people in the treatment group will be encouraged to take a microfinance loan (essentially we'll heavily market microfinance to them), and the people in the control group won't be. People in either group are then free to get a microfinance loan if they choose to. The idea is that, hopefully, lots more of the people in the treatment group (the ones who had microfinance marketed to them) will decide to get loans, so that there will be a very strong correlation between being in the treatment group and having a microfinance loan. At the same time, having been told how great microfinance is will not, in itself, have any conceivable impact on whether or not your business does well or your family eats more meat, etc.

Thus if we want to know if microfinance increases a person's likelihood of buying a productive business asset (of course, we already know it does, because I said so in my thesis, and I'm always right) we can estimate the relationship between the encouragement "instrument" and the likelihood of buying a business asset. Since we know that the encouragement itself has no impact on buying a business asset, any estimated relationship between the two can be attributed to microfinance. The upshot in all this is that our instrument (the encouragement) is completely random--people in the treatment group should have, on average, characteristics identical to those of the people in the control group--so bias problems are completely avoided.

That's the theory anyway. This particular methodology hasn't been used for a microfinance field experiment before, so we simply don't know how well it's going to work. If take-up of microfinance isn't significantly higher in the treatment group, we're kind of screwed. But if it does work, the results should be both interesting and econometrically sound, which is great.

leavin' on my mind*

2007-05-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to get more freaked out about leaving the country. I think my anxiety is emanating from a couple different sources, most of which I can do something about. I don't know very much about what is going on when I get there (where I'll stay in Accra that first night, how I'll get to Kumasi, when I'll meet up with the IDEC students that will be there also, etc), but obviously those are things I can plan or find out. I have a ridiculous amount of stuff crammed into my little apartment, and I'm not sure if it will all fit in a storage unit, but packing up some more of it and getting some price quotes on storage units would probably help.

And then there's the fact that I will be very far away from the west coast of the United States for 3 months. This is obviously a choice that I am making freely, and for the most part happily. I'm already be accustomed to being away from many of the people that I care about, so the additional distance will be difficult, but probably not overwhelming (one concern that I have is the ease of internet access in Kumasi--I don't think connections are as fast and cheap there as in India, and apparently there's an energy crisis happening in Ghana, so electricity could be especially inconsistent). I'm even used to be away from DWE for longish stretches of time, which helps. But usually "longish" means 3, not 13, weeks. By the time I get back, we will have been dating for almost a year, but a fourth of that will have been while I was in Ghana, to say nothing of the weeks and weeks that he has spent travelling as well (I know it's hard to believe, but I swear he and I do actually know each other--surprisingly well, in fact). I want desperately to tell you that I am not pathetically depressed about leaving in general, and leaving DWE in particular, but I really kind of am both depressed and pathetic.

To ease my pain, I think I'm going to make up a reason that I "need" to go to Target today. I can't really afford to engage in much retail therapy, but I can at least soak up the shiny American materialism, and probably pick up some more packing tape or something.

*This, as you may know, is the slightly modified (should be "your", not "my") title of a Patsy Cline song (well, I don't know who wrote it, or if someone else sang it before her, but she does a version of it). Last night I had a dream that I was auditioning for my old high school drama teacher and I had to sing a song for her. I practiced a Lionel Richie song (don't ask me why or which one...I think it wasn't even a real song, just something my subconscious made up), but then when I got up for my audition, they played "Foolin' 'Round" (by Patsy Cline) instead, so I got all flustered and tried to sing that instead. And then my drama teacher criticized my outfit, and then I woke up. All in all, much better than my usual anxiety dream, which involves climbing down from someplace precarious and high up without sufficient footholds.

ch-ch-ch-changes

2007-05-23T19:43:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite exchanges from the television show Monk:

Monk: "There's an old saying: don't change ANYTHING EVER."
Natalie (Monk's assistant): "THAT'S an old saying?"
Monk: "I've been saying it for years."

Despite the inherent appeal of Monk's advice, and despite the possibility of disconcerting some of my most loyal readers, I'm revamping the j-curve a bit. Taking advantage of my impending research job in Ghana, I've decided to focus more specifically and formally on economics and on the microfinance research that I will be conducting. Although I will still be writing, in general, for a lay audience ("lay" when it comes to econ, of course--y'all are brilliant and technically skilled in your various fields), my economics- and research-related posts will become more numerous, and may become a bit more technical and/or narrowly focused.

Having said that, this blog will still be as effective a means as ever for keeping up with my personal life. I will still post pictures and tell stories in which I get groped by a 15-year-old in public or get into yelling matches with rickshaw drivers over the equivalent of 11 cents (or whatever the Ghanaian equivalent of those stories are). And as always, read what you want and ignore what you want; I will still love and respect you even if you don't read a word of what I write. To facilitate selective reading, I will start using the "labels" function, which you will see at the end of this post (a shout-out to Rebel's blog for giving me the idea and letting me see how it works). My currently plan is to just label each post as either "personal" or "economics", so that if you use the search function at the top of the page, you can type in "personal" to weed out the posts where I discuss, say, the problems I'm having with defining a random control group. Which is not to say that my economics-related posts won't be interesting and accessible, it's just to say that I don't expect you to care just because I do.

This is a bit of an experiment, so we'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I'm done with grading (yay!) and I am going to spend the evening catching up on other peoples' blogs and just generally goofing off.

graduation

2007-05-21T23:24:00.000-07:00

Graduation was a blur, albeit a lovely one. My mother and DWE were both there, along with my dear friends/fellow graduates, including E, M, H, JSOC, and many others that haven't been mentioned specifically on this blog but are wonderful people with whom I greatly enjoyed sharing the past two years. The ceremony was (mercifully) less than an hour and a half long, and the name-calling and stage-crossing part happened very quickly. All I really remember is that my friends cheered (and I cheered for them, of course) and that the woman reading the names pronounced my last name incorrectly (she made an "i" sound where there is clearly an "o"...it's a subtle difference, but it drives me crazy, as many of you know).

Most of the good pictures are on my mom's camera, so I'll have to wait until I get them from her to post them, but in the mean time here's a nice one of her and me, posing in the midst of the post-graduation mob.

The next day my mom and I did the tourist thing on one of DWE's double-decker buses (you know, 'cause he hooks me up with free tickets), did some quick shopping downtown, and had lunch at Pier 39. She headed back to Bakersfield that afternoon, at which point I transitioned into my Completely Unproductive and Inert phase, which lasted until late Sunday night. Since then I've done a couple of hours of grading (Intro Macro finals...my last USF obligation, if you don't count Ghana) and not much else. Tonight I went to a little shindig at a bar down in the Mission thrown by my pal and fellow IDEC-er JP (not to be confused with B's JP, although this one is French as well). JP and I are doing essentially the same research project this summer, only he's working in Chennai with IMED (he also spent Winter Break in Chennai doing yet a different project).

So once I finish grading the finals it's just packing up my apartment and getting ready for Ghana. In addition to travel preparation, JP and I need to come up with a draft of our survey, and I need to talk to the 1st-years that I'll be in Ghana with about logistical stuff. 3 and a half weeks to go...

what's even better than winning?

2007-05-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

The econ party was last night. The food was a little better than usual for a Bon Appetit-catered event (I have to say--they aren't as good at USF as they were at Willamette), and there was a reasonably good turnout.

(Before I go on, I have to mention that E, who is still staying with me, just got out of the shower and seems to be doing some kind of dance/mime show combination for me in his underwear. He does a lot of singing and dancing.)

Anyway, back to the party. They announced the winner of the various awards, including the IDEC award. As you may recall from a previous post, I predicted that JSOC was going to win. But of course I'm human, and I'm inordinately enamored of myself, so I wanted to win also. I'm happy to report that the award results left me totally gratified: JSOC and I tied to win, meaning that I both won and guessed the winner correctly. The only problem was that H and I had a bet riding on it (if JSOC won, H bought me a pitcher of beer; if I won, I bought H a pitcher), and we both won the bet (or lost, depending on how you look at it). And, of course, in a larger sense, the whole thing is a bit silly. JSOC and I both worked really hard and did well, but then again so did E, H, and the girl we don't know that well (not to mention the many people not nominated that also worked really hard and did really well). Don't get me wrong, I love winning, but given what a collaborative experience grad school was for me, the whole award thing is kind of bogus.

Well, the sheets for the futon are probably about ready to go in the dryer, and I have a lot to do before my mom gets here, so I suppose I should get to it. I'll probably post pictures of graduation tomorrow.

almost a graduate

2007-05-16T20:33:00.000-07:00

The work associated with receiving my masters degree is now officially over. I took my macro final last night (it didn't go that well, but it doesn't matter--worst case scenario is that I get an A-) and turned in my last journal article summary this morning. The only obligations that I still owe to USF are my TA duties, which are down to grading one set of problem sets and a portion of the final exam for Intro Macro.

I had no idea what I was going to wear to graduation (under the gown, I mean), but fortunately I just dug a dress that I'd forgotten about out of the back of my closet. It still fits (better than it did back when I bought it, if I recall correctly) and it's cute (despite being a few years out of style), so I'm wearing it. While I had the dress on, I decided to try on the whole ensemble ("regalia" is I suppose the word I'm looking for): cap, gown, and hood. The hood was confusing, but I think I figured it out. Anyway, prior to tonight, "graduating" and "having a masters degree" had seemed like very abstract concepts and had not roused much of my enthusiasm, but I have to admit that when I looked at myself in the mirror in my graduation get-up, I got a little choked up. I am really happy to be getting this degree, and I also miss my dad and wish he were here (and also that song "My Hometown" by Bruce Springstein, which has nothing to do with graduating but is full of melancholic nostalgia, was playing on my computer at the time).

In other news, I finally purchased my ticket to Ghana. I leave June 13th and return on September 12th. I will be leaving SF around June 7th, so I only have a couple weeks left to pack, move, and deal with all of my travel preparations (immunizations, visa, writing a draft of the survey, etc).

DWE is in Guayaquil (why-a-KEEL), Ecuador right now, where he apparently has a "translator" who doesn't speak english very well. He was in SF this past weekend, though, and I got to spend a lot of time hanging out with him. On Saturday I decided I wanted to take some pictures of him/us so that I could have a picture of us that I like to take with me to Ghana. He was trying to work while I was doing our little photo shoot, and he became increasingly irritated as I kept making him pose for pictures because I didn't like how I looked.

After several pictures that looked sort of like the one above, I decided I just looked bad...

...so I powdered my face and put on some lip gloss. That was better, but...

...then I figured out that if I sat behind him, I could hide my double chin. Note the increasingly strained expression on his face.

Unsurprisingly, this was DWE's favorite picture of himself. Oh, and I apologize for the gratuitously "couple-y" pictures. I know it is somewhat (okay, very) obnoxious. I'm sad that you guys haven't gotten to meet him yet, and somehow it makes me feel like you sort of know him if you know what he looks like. And besides, isn't he handsome? (Okay, I know, I'm just making it worse now. I'll stop.)

update

2007-05-12T18:00:00.000-07:00

I'm back, and there's lots to report from the past week:

The thesis is absolutely, officially done. I was officially "passed" (actually, I got a "pass with honors"), meaning that no more revisions are required and everyone is happy and I can graduate and stuff.
Ghana dates and details have been firmed up a bit. I'll be there from approximately June 14th to September 14th (will probably be buying the tickets tonight). I'm excited to be there for 3 solid months, and will probably need all that time to accomplish what my advisor would like me to do. The downside is that I will miss MJ's wedding, which is a huge disappointment, but I suppose I'm starting to have something that may someday resemble a career, and that a few sacrifices may have to be made.
All I have left, school-wise, is my macro final on Tuesday. I'm so over school that I can barely bring myself to study.
I was nominated for that "Best IDEC Student" award (not the actual name of the award), along with E, H, and JSOC (and another girl in our program that we don't know that well). This works out nicely, because the overwhelming likelihood is that someone that I like a lot will win the award. And I'm happy enough just putting on my resume that I was a "finalist" for it, so it's okay if it's not me (my predicted winner: JSOC).

Okay, I guess I didn't have that much to report. And DWE is looking for my Ghana ticket for me, so I should probably be paying more attention to him. More soon.

pee cola

2007-05-06T20:11:00.000-07:00

It's been a low-key, funky weekend here. On Friday night I came down with a bizarre, sudden fever and really severe chills. These went away eventually, but the next day I was achey and exhausted and feverish all day. The odd thing is that I don't have a sore throat or stuffy nose or anything else that I would expect to accompany a fever. DWE reported similar symptoms this weekend, so I probably got it from him (or vice versa, I suppose).

Whatever it was, it seems to be mostly gone today, with the exception that my head hurts every time I stand up. At four o'clock this afternoon I decided that I was done being in my apartment, so I took BART out to the Target in San Bruno. I got a dress that was on clearance for $19.58 that I will take to Ghana with me. I'm trying not to buy much clothing for Ghana because I don't really need to; I already have stuff I can bring and I'm going to pack much more lightly than I did for India. But bringing fewer outfits also means that I want to make sure the ones I do bring work really well, and this dress should be good for field work: it is lightweight, modest, won't easily show dirt or sweat, and is comfortable with out looking slobbish.

While I was at the mall where the Target is, I popped into Barnes & Noble to see if they had a book on Ghana, which they did. I didn't buy it, but I flipped through it a bit and found out a few things, including what vaccinations I'll need (yellow fever, hep A, and malaria pills--typhoid too, but I think the one I got for India is good for 3 years) and approximate food/lodging costs (cheap, but maybe a bit more expensive than India--not that I care, since I won't be paying for anything). I also found out that a local, popular brand of cola is called "Pee Cola" (apparently "Pee" is a common surname in Ghana).

I have a doctor's appointment at 8:45 in the freakin' morning tomorrow, so I'm going to make some vague attempt to go to bed early, I think.

ghana

2007-05-04T21:57:00.000-07:00

Well, the exciting news that I alluded to yesterday is that I have a job for the summer. My advisor is paying me to go to Ghana to collect some baseline survey data for a new microfinance field experiment that he's doing. I'm not yet sure of any of the details, but I'll probably leave mid-June and be gone for about two months (MJ--I will do everything possible to be home for your wedding, but I can't promise at this point). There are three IDEC 1st-years doing their summer field research in Ghana (one of whom is Ghanaian), so I will be primarily with them. They are using the same methodology that E, M, and I used for our theses, so I can also be a resource to them as they're implementing their survey. We'll be in rural areas somewhere outside of Accra, the capital, but I don't know any more details beyond that.

As you can see below, Ghana is in West Africa, between Cote D'Ivoire and Togo. (Also note Equatorial Guinea, which was "discovered" by the Portuguese, sandwiched between Cameroon and Gabon.)

It is also just an 8-hour drive, or so I've been told, from Ghana to Nigeria, which is where Muffin will be for a month or so at some point early this summer. It probably won't be feasible to go visit him, but wouldn't that be cool?

Random side note about this map: "Zaire" is now the "Democratic Republic of Congo". (Does anyone remember Mike Meyers doing "Coffee Talk" on SNL? "I'm getting verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves--I'll give you a topic. The Democratic Republic of Congo: neither democratic nor a republic--discuss.") It's been DR Congo for a while now, I think longer than Cote D'Ivoire started insisting that English speakers stop calling it "Ivory Coast". So who knows why it's Zaire on this map.

So, that's the story, kids. I'll provide details as they become available, and in another post I'll describe in some (but not too much) detail the nature of the surveying I'll be doing, because it is mildly interesting.

feeling defensive

2007-05-04T00:50:00.000-07:00

When I talked to DWE this morning he asked me if I was "feeling defensive" and it kind of annoyed me. But of course now that I'm done I think it's hilarious. (And I'd like to briefly say that DWE was particularly wonderful and supportive today, which mostly makes up for how freaking often he is out of town.)

My thesis has officially been defended, and I think it went quite well. I should mention at this point that thesis "defense" is, in my opinion, sort of a courtesy title in my program. We don't exactly get ripped to shreds. Basically we give a 20 minute PowerPoint presentation on our thesis, and professors (and students, if they want) ask us a couple of questions. Sometimes the questions are rather pointed. If you have your shit together, it's no big deal. What I had to do today should not be compared to what PhD candidates have to do.

I was still freakin' nervous, of course. I wasn't very worried about getting questions that I couldn't answer (because I do, generally speaking, have my shit together), but I was concerned about sounding inarticulate or getting tripped up in the middle of a sentence or going over my time. As it turns out, I managed to present the information clearly and articulately and without looking at my notes; I had to rush a bit at the end because of time constraints, but I essentially said everything I wanted to say. I knew the answers to the questions I was asked, and for one question I had the "right" answer insofar as I had done the correct thing methodologically.

So now you're saying to yourself, okay, great, but why is she blogging instead of out partying right now? I was out celebrating, of course, from about 6 to midnight, but then DWE and I headed home so that we could spend a little quality time together, and now he's sleeping, but I'm not quite tired yet. Well, okay, I'm tired now, but I wasn't when I started writing this post. And I may not sound drunk, but you'd be surprised how long it's taking me to both formulate these words and type them correctly.

I have other exciting news, but I'm going to save it for tomorrow (or actually later on today, given that it's after midnight), both to create suspense and because I'm too tired to tell you now.

So yeah, today was good. And you all are fabulous for being so attentive to and supportive of my little grad school milestones.

myspace experiment

2007-04-30T11:27:00.000-07:00

If you go to my myspace page, you will discover that I am a 56-year-old man. E (who is still staying with me) and I are doing an experiment to see how myspace.com decides what advertisements you get on your page when you log in (well, E is doing the experiment, and I'm just sort of letting him use my profile). Last night we changed me to a 23-year-old male (same as E), and this morning my ads were different. Instead of Victoria's Secret and laser skin treatments, I was getting "Win a free XBox" and ads for a dating website featuring a hot chick. So now I'm posing as a creepy old man to see if I get Cialis ads.

Yes, E and I have spent too much time in this little apartment working on our theses. The revisions are due today, but I'm basically done except for maybe a sentence or two at the end and another quick read-through. And God bless my friend C, who came over yesterday and made me work on the Macro problem set, because we managed to finish it (after spending literally two hours trying to figure out how to solve one problem that essentially involved algebraic manipulation to get one thing to look like something else), and now I don't have to worry about it anymore.

DWE was supposed to be back today, but he apparently has some urgent business in D.C. and then NYC. He was also supposed to come to my thesis defense on Thursday, and he said (during a phone call from Reykjavik) that he still will, but it sounds like it would involve him flying from D.C. to SF for basically one day, and then heading right back out to the east coast, which is ridiculous. I really appreciate his desire to be there like he said he would be, but I don't think I can let him fly around unnecessarily like that.

Okay, I'm supposed to be reading H's thesis for him (it's also due today--same advisor) so I better get back to work.

shoe shopping

2007-04-28T16:41:00.000-07:00

My stepmom and her friends are in SF this weekend, so I met them today for lunch and a little shopping. I'd brought the skirt I'm planning on wearing for my thesis defense with me with the intention of looking for a top to go with it. But we went shoe shopping, so instead I got shoes to go with it. Which is in fact very practical, because I really don't have any dressy light brown shoes, but I have dressy light brown clothing. My stepmom very thoughtfully bought the brown shoes for me (actually, they're more of a bronze), and then at another store I found the black ones. I do have several pairs of black dress shoes, but none quite as cute as these. And both pairs are cute and fun but could also be worn to work, which is I guess something I have to start thinking about.

We had martinis at lunch (I know...shoe shopping and martinis...my stepmom and her friends know how to have fun), and now I'm all sleepy. So much for getting work done this afternoon.

ooh, pretty colors

2007-04-26T23:20:00.000-07:00

I used some of Blogger's new features to make my blog look a bit more obnoxiously red and purple, which, as you may know, is how I prefer everything in my life to be.

yeah, i'm still talking about my thesis

2007-04-26T22:18:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been AWOL for a bit. I can't help but thinking that what T.S. Elliot was really talking about when he called April the "cruelest month" is the fact that school gets busiest right when the weather gets nice. And it has been quite lovely here.

It's pretty much been the same old same-old since my last post. I spent last week catching up in Macro, and got thesis comments back from my advisor last Friday. He was generally happy, but he did ask us to make one change to the data (a change that we had actually more or less suggested earlier, only to be rebuffed, but that's kind of a long and complicated story). It's just a minor change to how 2 variables are constructed, but it adds 2 years' worth of data that was being dropped from the regression (for mathematical reasons related to how regression coefficients are estimated) back in. Lots of interesting stuff happened in those two years, so it totally changed my results. I have to pretty much rewrite my entire data analysis section because my results are really different and because I now have demand-side endogeneity to correct for. I haven't done much of the rewriting yet, but I've re-run all of the regressions and redone all the charts. I had to give a "practice" defense presentation in Grad Seminar last night, and it went reasonably well. Once I rewrite the paper (revisions are due on Monday) I can revise and strengthen the conclusions/implications section of my presentation (it's pretty weak at the moment because I haven't thought about my new results enough to have much to say about them), and then just practice a bunch before Thursday (which is when I defend).

E has been staying with me since DWE left town on Saturday. It's nice to have the company, but it's made me realize how used to living alone I am (and how much time I spend naked or half-dressed in my apartment, which I obviously can't do with E around). But E is an entertaining and generally neat houseguest, and since he's working on his thesis too (and having many of the same frustrations I'm having), it works out well.

DWE has been at some big, important trade show in Aneheim since Saturday. It was kind of entertaining to have him drunk-dial me most nights at 2 in the morning (they drink free alcohol and dance and shmooze into the wee hours, apparently). I know that he's actually working pretty hard and that shmoozing people all day on very little sleep isn't all that fun for him, but of course my reaction is "how come you never take me out dancing?" He said that he would, which will probably only happen if I pester him repeatedly about it (which I'm perfectly willing to do). I pointed out to him that we had one night of dancing, at the Cherry Poppin' Daddies concert that we went to on our second date. "You know, back when you were still trying to impress me," I said. "Thank God I don't have to do that anymore," he said. Isn't he dreamy?

I did absolutely no work for most of the day today. I didn't even shower and get dressed until 8:30 at night (yeah, I know, what's the point?). I finally did the dishes and completed a few administrative tasks, and I might even work on my thesis or my job hunt a little bit. Or maybe not.

thesis done! yay!

2007-04-15T14:31:00.000-07:00

I just emailed the "final" draft of my thesis to my advisor. It's not really a final draft, because he will probably recommend a few changes, as will people in Grad Seminar, but it's a complete and polished draft anyway. Well, okay, it's not even all that polished, it just looks that way because I write well. I guess the parts of it that I wrote a while ago, like the lit review and the data description, are pretty well polished.

The point is, it's done and turned in. I don't have to think about it for the next week while my advisor looks at it. Yay, yay, yay. I'm so happy.

On the other hand, I have a Macro problem set due on Tuesday that I haven't even started, a half-finished journal article presentation for Macro that I've been putting off for two weeks, Intro exams to finish grading (I could get away with pawning the rest of that off onto Dr. J, but I don't really want to do that), CA state taxes to file, and a job to look for. If I were a superstar I'd start the Macro problem set tonight, but I'm not a superstar, so I think it's going to get done in a marathon session tomorrow instead. But grading can be done while drinking, and drinking is what I feel like doing.

r.i.p. kurt vonnegut

2007-04-12T13:58:00.000-07:00

As you probably heard, Kurt Vonnegut died last night at the age of 84. He was among my favorite authors. I think he was among many people's favorite authors. Anyway, I didn't know him, and I wasn't very interested in his recent work, so it's not exactly sad, except maybe in some meta-death kind of way, but there it is. Maybe I'll give Breakfast of Champions a reread in his honor.

But then again, things with my thesis are getting messy again. I discovered something that is probably significantly biasing my results, and according to my advisor I'm not supposed to fix it, even though I think I should (in fairness, I did not speak to my advisor directly about this, so he is not aware of my particular dilemma). The circumstances under which my thesis is being written are becoming continually more frustrating, but at this point I've basically decided to do what I think makes sense, and if my advisor doesn't like it he'll certainly tell me.

books

2007-04-12T00:56:00.000-07:00

In the midst of being mildly panicked about my thesis, it occurred to me with a certain degree of shame that I've been reading the same book (Dance Dance Dance) since January*. I started it in Belize, then neglected it for a month after school started. When I picked it back up, I decided to start from the beginning again (I was only 50 or so pages in). I'd been reading in little spurts maybe once a week or less throughout March and the beginning of April, and then on Monday night I decided to stay up after E (who was crashing at my place that night) went to bed and finish up the last 100ish pages. It was an odd but enjoyable book. It was written in the 80s (or at least set in them), and there was a fairly strong anticapitalist theme, particularly apropos to the period. It was a rather lazy, nihilistic anticapitalism, which is my favorite kind. The book also had creepy supernatural elements which were very well written and freaked the shit out of me. I expected a particular ending, and I was dreading that ending, and then it didn't happen, and I was relieved but also kind of disappointed. Anyway, I enjoyed it very much, and it was great to read something by a non-English-writing author (the book was translated of course; I didn't become fluent in written Japanese while you weren't paying attention).

So now, in honor of tax season (or the rapidly approaching end of it), I decided to move on to Perfectly Legal, the thesis of which is that the American tax system is highly regressive, with the somewhat poor, the middle class, and even the genuinely wealthy subsidizing the tax shirking of the super-rich (who are even richer than we are aware because they know how to avoid reporting gobs of their income). Since I'm getting a fat refund this year, I figure now is a good time to read a book that seems to pride itself on making its readers livid regarding the unfairness of the tax system. It also fits the bill more generally for my next book: it's nonfiction, to follow fiction, but it's reasonably engaging layperson nonfiction, so it will still feel like a break from school.

Speaking of school, I'm feeling in good shape for having my thesis done on Sunday. It won't be a perfect draft, but it will be beyond a rough draft. We hit a few more snags in our regression specifications tonight (snags that I'm not sure my advisor has considered), but it will get worked out easily enough. After Sunday I need to refocus on Macro, my poor neglected other class.

And now it's time to focus on sleep. Yay, sleep!

*DWE pointed out to me that in this time I also read his sister's book, as well as The Bachelor Home Companion by P.J. O'Rourke, who is pretty funny despite being, as far as I can tell, a semi-pathetic, semi-despicable human being. But these books were short and easy reads about which I have little to say, so they don't count. (Although I will impart upon you my two favorite bits of advice from Bachelor Home Companion: 1. keep your sheets clean by getting drunk and falling asleep with your clothes on. 2. if your house is really messy, just tell guests: "Please excuse how the place looks. I'm psychotic.")

word-a-day colonialism

2007-04-08T23:59:00.000-07:00

I usually don't get too hysterical about these things (you know, now that I'm an evil capitalist instead of a righteously-indignant socialist), but this one surprised me a little. Yesterday's "word of the day" on my "Word-a-Day" calendar is "Equatorial Guinea". First of all, yeah, I know, what kind of a "word" is that? I have many beefs with this calendar, one of which is that the Saturday words, which are all accompanied by a picture or diagram, are always pretty silly. Usually some kind of obscure animal or architectural term or something I'd never be able to use in conversation and therefore probably never retain unless I worked really hard at it. Or it's something like "Equatorial Guinea", which does not need "defining" per se, but at least I learn a few interesting facts about it. Anyway, I will now quote from the "definition" of Equatorial Guinea: Originally inhabited by Pygmy peoples, it was discovered by the Porgtuguese in 1472.

Come on, really? Are we really still referring to non-Western countries as having been "discovered"? I'm not saying that it should say "it was raped and plundered by the Portuguese in 1472", but dude, discovered?

happy easter

2007-04-08T11:12:00.000-07:00

As you might imagine, things have perked up a little regarding my thesis. The data from IMED was not what we had asked for, but it ended up being okay. Actually, it ended up meaning that I had to go back and change a bunch of dates in our data that were apparently wrong, and then recreate all the variables we need in Stata, which was a pain. But not nearly as much of a pain as I thought it would be, and now our data is correct and will probably yield more interesting results, which is a good thing. On the other hand, I ran a few of the preliminary tests to identify supply-side endogeneity, and I seem to be finding that there is some, which is bad but not the end of the world.

So I don't know if things regarding my thesis are really any better, or if I've just decided to accept them how they are because the thing is due in a week and I still have to figure out how to test for demand-side endogeneity and finalize my results and write between ten and twenty more pages and create a couple more charts, etc. Regardless of why, I'm feeling better, and even sort of looking forward to working on it.

Yesterday I didn't get any work done on my thesis, mostly because I spent most of the day either preparing for or attending a barbecue that one of my classmates and her husband had. I had a really good time, and I had enough to drink that when I got home, I couldn't exactly do anything productive besides maybe some grading, and I didn't even feel like doing that. I've been trying to go to bed earlyish lately, but I haven't been sleeping well, so either I wake up in the middle of the night for a couple hours, or I take something sleep-encouraging like an allergy pill, and it puts me out for ten hours. Yesterday I could have gotten up at 9 a.m. (early in my world) when my mother called me and spoke to me in a loud, animated voice (she claims she wasn't yelling) about the very expensive call to Paris on my (i.e. her) cell phone bill. But I went back to sleep afterwards.

procrastinationishness

2007-04-03T14:14:00.000-07:00

I have to present a journal article in Macro tonight, and I haven't even finished reading it yet. So I thought a quick blog entry would be, you know, productive somehow.

We finally got the extra data that we needed from IMED, but I'm semi-certain that it's not really the information we asked for. I'm also becoming increasingly convinced that there is yet another way in which our data are fundamentally at odds with our methodology (or, as I have been pointedly calling it, our advisor's methodology). Everytime I think about my thesis I literally want to cry.

All news is not bad: E returns from D.C. tomorrow. His presence is always welcome, and now there will be three of us to suffer in our thesis hell together (yes, it's possible that I'm being melodramatic, but I really don't care).

african miniaturized hedgehog

2007-04-01T23:27:00.000-07:00

DWE and I took a little roadtrip this weekend. We had no plan or intended destination, so we just sort of drove and stopped in places that seemed interesting. We spent the first night in Marysville and the second night in Chico (yes, we drove through Stevie's hometown, Paradise). It was a wonderfully aimless and relaxing trip. DWE is a big fan of back roads, so it took us over six hours to get back to the city today (and we drove on a dirt road for almost thirty miles), but the scenery was incredible. Lots of really beautiful valleys, a couple lakes (one of which we stopped at and I learned how to skip a rock over water), old farms, fields of wildflowers, tree-lined roads, wine country, etc. I made DWE play the guessing game with me (one person thinks of something, the other person asks yes or no questions until he or she guesses it). DWE is terrible at the game because it's almost impossible to get him to think of anything other than Scott Bakula (I'd explain why, but it's a long, nonsensical story). We had the following conversation no less than five times:

"Okay, I thought of something."
"Is it an animal?"
"Yes."
"Is it a human?"
"Yes."
"Is it Scott Bakula?"
"Yes. You're so good at this game."
"Stop picking Scott Bakula!"

When it was his turn to guess, he'd always ask me if something was smaller than an African Miniaturized Hedgehog, which is apparently about the size of a fist.

Up in the mountains past Paradise, we ended up on a dirt road that didn't really go anywhere, and encountered some people from the tiny town several miles downhill that had a flat tire. We drove the mom and the daughter back into town to get their other truck, and she was telling us about how they let thier ten-year-old and eight-year-old sons drive sometimes up on the little dirt roads, and it's so funny because the eight-year-old doesn't really get the concept of letting go of the clutch after he changes gears so they just keep stalling, and I'm thinking, you let your eight-year-old drive?! In Chico I had a fun drunken bathroom bonding moment with a girl in the next stall who needed some TP, and then asked my opinion about her hairstyle. It was very cute. I also had a salad with a really, really good vinagrette dressing (good enough that I feel the need to tell you about it).

So now I'm back in SF and I'm tired and I have a ton of work to do. I did get my federal taxes done on Friday before we left, which is nice, especially since I got to file for free online and since I'm getting an $817 refund (student loans don't count as income, and I only made $5000 as a TA last year, so I get all the taxes I paid refunded, plus I qualify for the EITC). But the much more important April 15th deadline is my thesis being due, and although I've made decent progress with running all my regressions, I really need to get a lot done this week.

South African butt plant

2007-03-26T22:57:00.000-07:00

I actually had a really great time in Bakersfield. I guess I should expect to have a good time; otherwise, why would I visit? (Out of obligation, I suppose.) Anyway, the trip was relaxing and productive, which is what I was hoping for. My sister-in-law and I got my brother to taste raw fish while we were having sushi (think of how picky an eater I am, then marry it with intractable stubborness, and you have my brother) and we taught him how to use chopsticks. Well, okay, she did most of the teaching, partly because he takes instruction from her more readily than from me, and partly because I find that when you're learning to do something, it's usually not helpful to have more than one person telling you what to do. But I did throw in the insight that the bottom stick should be held still while the top one moves, which I think was helpful.

I spent a lot of time in our backyard helping my mom with chores and playing with the dog. The landscaping my mother has done is really beautiful, and the weather was perfect: sunny and 70ish with a slight breeze. If only Bakersfield would stay like that instead of becoming an unlivable furnace. We also did a bit of the requisite shopping; at Target, my mother-approved (and mother-financed) impulse purchase was a little succulent garden I made by purchasing three succulent plants (they're a kind of cactus without pokey things--or at least that's what they seem to be) and a red pot for them. Two of the plants I bought because they were pretty (and in my experience succulents are quite hardy), but the third I bought because it is shaped exactly like a butt. Exactly.

According to the plant's tag, it is South African, so I asked my sis-in-law about it. She said she'd seen the sort of plant before, and that the butt will open up and a second pair of "cheeks" will grow in perpendicularly to the first. Apparently it will also flower in the winter. But isn't it freaky looking right now?

DWE is coming to SF tonight, a day earlier than was expected. I hesitate to even mention this, partly because it's trivial, and partly because more important "anniversaries" have gone unexcusably unheralded by me (specifically dear, wonderful A's birthday, which I neglected while wrapped up in the PacDev converence), but today is the 6-month anniversary of when DWE and I met. It seems like it's been longer, especially given how often he's out of town, but it also surprises me that it's been that long, given how much can and does happen in half a year. So far things seem to be working out pretty well, but I guess I'll get back to you on that in another six months.

lovely

2007-03-21T22:38:00.000-07:00

I'm in a lovely mood this evening. I presented my data analysis, or what there is of it so far, in Grad Seminar tonight. Basically I presented the same results from the PacDev conference, plus some additional regressions that I ran in the last two days in an attempt to get more significant results. In theory, this attempt was sort of successful, but the results I got are seriously weird. Anyway, I need to keep at it, because my thesis is due in 25 days, but at least I don't have to have anything prepared for class for the next few weeks. What I really should do is start writing my data analysis section, because even though I haven't settled on final results, I can write up my summary statistics (i.e. where did my data come from, what are the means and standard deviations of my variables, what are some of the characteristics of my sample of borrowers, etc).

I'm going to Bakersfield again this weekend ("weekend" in my world meaning Thursday morning to Monday morning). I was just there a few weeks ago, but as you may recall I was quite ill and therefore spent literally almost all of my time there in bed. I had been thinking about going to San Diego to see DWE this weekend, but he's not sure of his schedule, so he ended up recommending against it. Which is just as well, because I will be far more productive in Bakersfield, I will get to see my family, and DWE will be back in SF next Tuesday anyway.

Anyway, my bag is packed, I took a nice long bath, I had a good conversation with DWE, and now I'm drinking a Hornsby's and goofing off a little before bed, hence the lovely mood.

the last two weeks

2007-03-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

The problem with blogging, as I practice it, is that when I actually do something interesting, I don't have time to write about it, so I only post regularly when I'm watching paint peel or reading about the NAIRU. The nearly two weeks since my last post, however, have been a good bit more interesting.

I took my Macro Midterm, and I have reason to believe it went pretty well. There was half of one question that I had to sort of bullshit, so I don't think I aced it. The last question had me panicked, because it was a proof that I didn't know how to do. I had to prove that the slopes of two things were the same, but if I took the derivative (the way you find something's slope) I wasn't getting a useful answer, and if I did a series of substitutions to get the variables that I needed into the equation, I ended up losing the thing I needed to derive with respect to. So after scrawling out a desperate and aimless page of related math and graphs, I finally figured out that if I did one substitution, took the derivative, and then did the other substitution, then I'd get what appeared to be the right answer. A lot of work for what ended up being four lines long, but it's nice to be able to successfully derive a proof (even a very simple one).

I spent March 8th through 15th in D.C. (or, more specifically, at the Days Inn in Alexandria, with daily adventures into D.C.). H and JSOC were my travel companions on what could possibly have been my last Spring Break, and we generally had a very good time. We saw the usual monuments and buildings, I saw the awesome Jasper Johns exhibit (as well as a lot of other good art) at the National Gallery, and we did two cool things that I hadn't done on my previous trip to D.C.: the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and the International Spy Museum, both of which I really enjoyed. I'm not very interested in either air (well, except what I breathe) or space, but I have to admit that it's cool to touch a moonrock or see the amazingly tiny Apollo 11 shuttle that carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldren, and Michael Collins (the one that stayed on the shuttle...not to be confused with the Irish freedom fighter played by Liam Neeson in the movie of the same name) home from the moon. It was also cool to see a U2 spy plane like the one that took the surveillance photos that led to the Cuban missile crisis. And at the spy museum, there was this thing where you could test yourself to see how good of a spy you'd be, and I aced it (this, of course, was based simply on being able to remember details of my fake like and to make up new, plausible details on the spot...the computer kiosk couldn't tell obvious I am when I try to lie in real life).

So, D.C. was a lot of fun, and we got to spend some time with E, who has an intership at the State department. I also spent a big chunk of time while we were in D.C. getting work done and worrying about the Pacific Development Conference, but let's see a few pictures before I get into that.

Yes, that's my finger. I'm quite juvenile.

This is part of the new World War II Memorial. It was fairly conventional, but it did evoke some vague sense of international unity, along with the important respect for and gratitude toward the dead. I liked it.

A part of the WWII memorial close to my own heart. It was dusk when we visited these memorials, and the fading light and skeletal trees and greyness were all really lovely.

Here is E standing in front of the State Department building where he works. Doesn't he look handsome and professional? My little boy is all grown up!

And here are my other two boys, not being particularly grown up.

The giant Caulder mobile in the atrium of the National Gallery's modern wing.

A smaller Caulder (actually two of them) that I found out later I wasn't supposed to be photographing. Aren't the shadows awesome?

So, as I mentioned, the PacDev conference was two days after we returned, so I spent a lot of time working on my regressions and my powerpoint presentation while we were there (I also managed to read and summarize two macro articles...possibly the most productive I've ever been on a vacation). Then, after we got back, my advisor called me on early Friday afternoon to tell me about a bunch of changes and additions he wanted me to make (in his defense, I should have called him earlier in the week, but in my defense, he could have made his expectations clearer sooner...he's been throwing huge quantities of occasionally-contradictory information at me all semester, and I'm doing the best I can to record, absorb, and implement it all). I never got the data that I needed from the MFI, so I halfway faked it with data that I do have, and then, at my advisor's suggestion, I faked it the rest of the way with more data that I have. The first part of that took a while (well, just one very long late night in D.C.) but the rest of it I was able to do in a few hours on Friday. So I generated the new variables that I needed, I added the new regressions that he wanted, and I revised my presentation again. I had to go pick up the rental car (the conference was in Davis) on Friday night, I had to practice the presentation and make sure it wasn't too long, and I had to be all nervous and panicky, so I only got about 3 hours of sleep that night.

It didn't matter, though, because my nervousness kept me awake on Saturday morning, and I think my presentation ended up going pretty well. My advisor (and my other two professors that were there) said I did a really good job, as did my classmates (of course, what else would they say?). I know I sounded nervous and I spoke a little quickly, but I generally managed to be articulate and clear, I stayed within my 15 minute time limit, and I sounded more or less like I knew what I was talking about. And it was all over by 9 a.m., so I was able to relax for the rest of the day and enjoy the other presentations. The other IDEC students that presented (H, JSOC, and a girl named C that I'm buddies with) also did a good job--nervous but articulate and knowledgable--and they all had presentations that were, in my opinion, more interesting than mine.

Which actually brings me to a minor revelation I had on Saturday, which is that I'm not sure if I'm really that excited about microfinance, and I'm certainly not all that excited about my specific thesis topic. I'm not sure what I am excited about anymore. I still really love development economics, but the uncertainty about what I'm going to do after I graduate is sort of snowballing at this point, and I'm not really sure about anything. I'm aggravated with DWE, not so much for always being out of town, but for never quite knowing where he's going to be or when or for how long. He's probably going to be back in SF on Tuesday, but he doesn't know when he's leaving again, and it could be right away. And when he leaves, he doesn't know where he's going. The only thing I know for sure is that when he does get back he'll be tired, and I'll have class. I'm sure we'll have a great time.

But then again, I just found out that he scored 20 points higher than me on the SAT, which is annoying because he beat me, but otherwise an extremely attractive quality (yes, I know how demented I am). Except for his schedule, I really adore him. He seems to think that I'm eventually going to get sick of his travelling and break up with him, and I keep telling him that it's not going to happen, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe he's right.

pack your passports, we're going to New Orleans

2007-03-04T18:10:00.000-08:00

I'm grading Intro Macro exams, and I came across a wrong answer so spectacularly (and depressingly) funny that I have to share. The question I'm currently grading is about whether certain transactions would be included in the U.S.'s GDP. One of the transactions is the U.S. government spending $200,000 doing reconstruction in New Orleans. This would be included in GDP, since government spending gets included (as long as it is spent on a final good or service, and not, say, as a transfer payment like unemployment insurance). Someone wrote on their exam, however, that this would not be included in GDP, because New Orleans is not within our national borders. Where does she think Louisiana is? Mexico? France? Or has she been living in a cave with her eyes shut and her ears plugged for the past couple years, thus never having heard of New Orleans?

At least I'm finally getting some work done. Grading is the easiest thing I have to do, but it's also the most boring, so it's probably good to get it out of the way.

so much to do, so little doing

2007-03-03T23:42:00.000-08:00

It is 11:42, and I haven't gotten a damn thing done today. Well, okay, that's not entirely true. I finished reading the book that DWE's sister wrote. I started it last night; it's only 200ish pages long, and not, shall we say, a challenging read, so it only took me a couple hours last night and a couple more this morning. Since when, you ask, is DWE's sister a published writer? Well, since last year, when she published her Christian fiction novel at a small publishing house of the sort that is not very discriminating and requires you to pay in order to be published. Anyway, I found out that DWE had not read the book yet, so I ordered it on Amazon so that we both could read it. It was, um, interesting. That's all I'm going to say.

What else did I do today? I went to the ballet, which was excellent, but I need to stop going to matinees (I can barely sit still through a two and a half hour ballet; why do parents think their three-year-old can?). Then I spent this evening watching Season 1, disc 2 of House, to which I am becoming addicted courtesy of Netflix. I have a Macro midterm in three days, I have to give a practice-version of my PacDev presentation in four days, I should have booked a hotel room for D.C. by now, my floor is covered in dirty laundry, my kitchen is covered in dirty dishes, etc. But I'm sitting here blogging. I guess the first step is admitting you have a problem ("My name is Jennifer, and I'm totally intert...").

On the plus side, I'm only a little tired, so I can in theory still get some stuff done tonight. If I stop writting this blog entry...

advising

2007-03-02T23:36:00.000-08:00

My advisor came up to SF today, so M and I met with him this afternoon, which ended up being very productive and helpful. He showed us how to make some necessary additions and modifications to our data so that we can run our regressions. I'm still missing the data that I need to run a village-level fixed effects regression (rather than a household-level one), but I was actually able to estimate some preliminary results today, which is exciting. (It's also a very good thing, since the Pacific Development conference is two weeks from now.)

My advisor made the weirdest comment to me today and I think I was kind of rude about it. I have a picture of DWE on my computer's desktop; it's a profile shot of him working on his laptop at the Sacramento airport, so his face is only partially visible. My advisor, who is a pretty good-looking white guy in (I think) his very early forties, saw the picture and asked who it was. I told him that it was my boyfriend. Then he said, "Gosh, he sort of looks like me." Now, like I said, my advisor is not bad looking, but I still found the comparison horrifying. First of all, he does not look like DWE (other than being of a similar age, having shortish brown hair, and being a white guy). Second of all, my advisor is, for various reasons, one of the last people on earth that I want compared to my boyfriend. He's a very nice guy, and he's a very smart guy, but he drives me nuts half the time, he can't spell my name right after almost two years (he calls me "Jen"), and I think of him as a very married, grown-up, nonsexual person.

Anyway, my reaction to him was literally to say, "Oh my god, please don't say that," in a sort of joking-yet-horrified way. And when M got there I told her to tell him that he doesn't look like DWE. I basically acted like it was the grossest thing I'd ever heard, and now I feel bad. But seriously, it was a vaguely creepy comment. (Which is not to say that he meant anything creepy by it, because he is not a creepy guy, but still.)

In other news, I'm going to the ballet again tomorrow, to see Sleeping Beauty. Other than that, it's going to be a working weekend--I have a Macro midterm to study for, exams to grade, thesis work to do, about four loads of laundry waiting, and my apartment is a pig sty. I really should have been more productive this evening, but I guess it's a little late for that.

rockin' the suburbs

2007-02-24T13:46:00.000-08:00

The health o' meter is running at about 90-95% today, I think. My voice still sounds a bit funny, and I still have to blow my nose a lot, but I feel fine, or very very close to it.

So, one annoying thing about being sick while I was in Bako was that I didn't get to properly enjoy the suburban splendor. No shopping trip to Target, no casual family dining, no traversing of vast parking lots. But last night, DWE and I met up, and we started driving south. "Where are we going?" I asked. "I need to buy a new razor. I dropped mine and broke it yesterday," he said. DWE hates chain stores, but as he observed, there aren't that many places to buy a razor at 8:30 p.m. that aren't chain stores, so we went to Target. I was, of course, delighted. I don't have access to a car and Target at the same time very often. So I got a big red pot and some potting soil, which I used this morning to re-pot the Peace Lily that B gave me a year ago when my dad died (despite how neglectful of a plant-mom I am, it is doing quite well, and will probably be much happier now that its roots can spread out). I also stocked up on toiletries and got a cardigan and a pair of jeans. DWE is baffled and mildly disturbed by my tendency to impulse shop and to be convinced that I "need" things like a travel case for Q-tips. He observed that "when I get my job at Goldman Sachs" (we have a running joke about me working at Goldman Sachs and supporting him) I'll shop like I do at Target, except I'll do it at Nordstrom's. I pointed out to him that that's the precise reason I don't really want to work at Goldman Sachs or anyplace else that would pay me a shit-ton of money (also, I probably don't want to do any of the jobs at Goldman Sachs, but that's another matter).

We hadn't had dinner yet, and since we were out in the suburbs, DWE busted out the entertainment book (the book with all the coupons in it) that he'd gotten for free (his company is thinking about advertising in the entertainment book, so they sent him a free sample...he's probably not supposed to be using the coupons in it). He came across the coupons for TGI Friday's, and I suddenly remembered that I'd seen a commercial for TGI Friday's while I was sick, and they were advertising something called "Crispy Green Bean Fries", which is exactly what it sounds like: breaded, deep-fried green beans. I love green beans, and I love deep fried things, and the commercial had made an indelible imprint on my fever-adled subconscious, so I immediately started lobbying for us to go to TGI Friday's.

Long story short: the Crispy Green Bean Fries did not disappoint (although I eschewed the wasabi ranch that they came with for regular ranch), but I did feel a bit of deep-fried-food-eater's remorse afterwards (they're probably better consumed in small quantities as an appetizer rather than as one's meal). I was marveling over the fact that it had taken someone so long to come up with the idea of deep-frying green beans when DWE characteristically responded that someone probably did think of it, but since they didn't work at one of the major chain restaurants that largely dominate the dining landscape, I'd been denied the experience. He's got a point, but I just can't work up his level of distaste for national chains. They're homogenous, they're culturally oppressive, they're frequently unattractive, but they're deeply comforting, not to mention convenient and usually affordable. I respect people like DWE who spend a minimum amount of time complaining about them and a maximum amount of time avoiding them, without being nazi-ish about it. I also respect people who like chains, frequent them, and understand and are willing to live with the consequences of them. I guess I'm somewhere in the middle.

Well, I need to get a little homework done before I head out to meet the econ kids for a couple drinks. I think I'll do the Econometrics problem set (i.e. the problem set for the class I'm TAing). If I do the homework then I'm able to help people with it more easily, and it's always more fun to do someone else's homework than my own.

recouperating

2007-02-19T13:13:00.000-08:00

I'm leaving Bakersfield to go back to SF in 2 hours. I haven't done anything but be sick since I've gotten here. I haven't left the house or even gone out into the backyard to see Emma (well, earlier today I stood at the back door and petted her, and I'll probably go out and sit on the patio with her after I'm done writing this). Even though I've hardly seen my family and I didn't get to do any of the things I wanted to, I'm still glad I came home because my mother, of course, has been taking excellent care of me, and I would have been miserable by myself in SF. On Thursday, Friday, and part of Saturday I had a fever, and I apparently do not deal well with fevers. I like to think that I'm generally not too much of a baby about being sick, but I cannot handle having a fever. On Thursday night my temperature was around 102 and I felt like I was dying. I was pathetic.

Anyway, I'm doing much better now; still achey and coughing up plenty of grossness, but my fever is totally gone, my sinuses are much clearer, and my energy is rebounding. Hopefully in a couple of days I will be back to normal. Being sick really put me behind in terms of schoolwork (which is particularly annoying because the plan for this weekend was to get ahead a little bit), but hopefully this means that I won't get sick again until after I graduate.

yucky yucky sick

2007-02-15T09:54:00.000-08:00

I'm sick. Yucky, awful, achey-shivery, talking is painful, breathing is not so fun either, hacking up chunks of phlegm kind of sick. (And yes, just to clarify, the purpose of this post, or at least this part of it, is to feel sorry for myself.) I missed the train I was supposed to take to Bako this morning, so I have to take a later one, which is mildly annoying but no big deal (especially since I realized I was going to miss it before I got to the train station or even left a one-block radius of my apartment building). Hopefully by then the drugs will have kicked in. The odd thing is that DWE got sick a couple days before I did, but I haven't seen him in a good ten days, most of which time he's been in Oregon. So it's a mystery to me how he got me sick (I know, you're all thinking that he obviously wasn't the one that got me sick. But I refuse not to have a scapegoat, and I can't seem to come up with anyone else, so he's the bad man with the sneaky interstate germs).

The happy news is that last night I finished marking all but one thing off of my long to-do list. Most notably, I finally got that email sent to IMED giving them a summary of our data and our early findings, and asking them for the info we need. It took a lot longer than I thought it would to get the whole thing prepared and written, but we really need the information that we're asking them for (when credit was first available from IMED in each area where we surveyed groups), so I wanted to make it as easy as possible for them to give us the information as quickly as possible. I discovered that we still have the addresses of most of the group meetings, so I typed the addresses onto our list of groups (even though IMED obviously has that information, hopefully that will eliminate a step for them). I have other thesis related stuff I could be doing (like looking for literature that's been published since I wrote my lit review or that I just missed last time I did research), but this does make me feel like I can not obsessively think/worry about it for a little while.

Okay, I have to go curl up in a ball under a blanket for a while.

human beings and economic models can't be trusted

2007-02-13T23:58:00.000-08:00

I've had a very productive day both today and yesterday, so I'm actually sitting here writing this blog entry without the vague, oppressive feeling that I should being doing something else. There are things I could be doing, like printing out and reading my classmates' lit reviews for class tomorrow night, but that can be done tomorrow, and the world won't end if I don't do it at all. So there.

I turned in my first Macro problem set tonight. It was quite time consuming and moderately difficult, but it did get me a bit more engaged in the material, which is a good thing. I'm not a big fan of macroeconomics (with the exception of international finance), and I haven't been paying much attention in class so far. We're studying the Solow (pronounced like "solo") growth model, which is probably the most famous and influential model for economic growth. I've learned the basics of the Solow model in at least three previous courses, but the iteration that we're learning now goes beyond what I've learned previously in terms of specificity and mathematical rigor. Without giving you one of my delightful econ lessons, I will summarize the Solow model this way: it is a simple (and I use that term relatively), highly abstract model that predicts that nations will converge to a "steady state" level of GDP growth in which capital intensity per worker and per capita GDP remain constant. It dates back to the 1960s (I love how young economics is as a science...less than 50 years ago we didn't even have a coherent theory of economic growth!), and has been widely empirically tested and theoretically built upon.

Where I'm going with this is that there's a first-year IDEC student who has made a couple of comments in class, one of which bordered on outright rudeness toward the professor, expressing his irritation that we have to learn the Solow model (or at least that it's being taught as something that might have a modicum of validity). He is of the opinion that the model has been essentially proven to have no basis in reality (which isn't true...there's plenty of empirical evidence that more complex and conditional versions of the model have validity, and there's a lively debate on the subject). Tonight in class the professor was talking about one of the central assumptions of the Solow model and why it's unlikely to be true, and he mentioned that later models reverse this assumption. The anti-Solow guy asked why we have to wait so long to learn those later models. "Are they based on the Solow model?" he asked, as though the thought hadn't occurred to him until that moment. Well, duh, of course they're based on the Solow model. Did he miss the part about how important and influential the model is? And if he disagrees with the theory of convergence so strongly, he should be, in my opinion, eager to learn as much as he can about the Solow model, because, to use highly scholarly language, you can't debunk shit that you don't understand.

I don't know why I even care what this guy thinks about the Solow model, especially when my level of interest in macro is so low. I guess economics has done a pretty good job of indoctrinating me with the idea that there's great value in mastering mathematically elegant, highly abstract economic theory as a precursor to going out and understanding the messy, inelegant economic world (not to mention the fact that my BA in history indoctrinated me with the idea that there's great value in learning the intellectual history of something). And this guy seems to feign a sort of intellectual engagement (as evinced by his empirical objections to the model) when in fact he just seems sort of lazy (he left class at the break...don't get me wrong, I would have liked to leave at the break too, but I didn't, and I also don't heckle the professor). In my non-academic interactions with him he seems like a nice guy, so I should probably stop criticizing him now...I'm sure he's just young and cocky, and haven't we all been there?

Amusing bus stop anecdote: I was waiting for the 5 after class tonight, sitting on the bench in the bus shelter, playing Tetris on my cell phone. A guy arrived at the bus stop and immediately started talking to me, despite the fact that I was deeply engrossed in my phone. After saying "Hi, how are you?" and barely getting an audible response from me, he started into this diatribe about how "human beings can't be trusted" and will take advantage of one another any chance they get. Random chatty bus people generally just annoy or amuse me, but this guy freaked me out a little. It was dark, no one else was around, and his line of conversation was so insistent and apropos of nothing apparent that I started to wonder if he was going to say "human beings can't be trusted, which explains why I'm going to rape you and leave you for dead." (I know, I watch too many procedural crime dramas.) So I stopped playing Tetris and sent a terse text to DWE: "Call me right now." DWE didn't respond, probably because his phone was off or not working (his phone has issues) or perhaps he was in the middle of some work thing instead of being at my beck and call (I know, what is he thinking?). Fortunately, the creepy guy's cell rang, so once he was on the phone I quickly called my mother.

So here's the amusing part: In addition to feeling mildly freaked out, I was also feeling guilty about making virtually no effort to respond to this guy's attempts to converse with me. I thought to myself that perhaps he was just a nice, socially awkward guy who'd had a recent bad experience, and here I was silently reinforcing his idea that people aren't nice to each other. Then I overheard the beginning of his phone conversation. I got from the context that he was speaking to a potential love interest (I'll assume based on his demeanor and statistical odds that the love interest was female), and I distinctly heard him say to her, "I'm in East Oakland right now...yeah, East Oakland. I told you I live in East Oakland, didn't I?" (I remind you that he was in fact in what I would generally describe as inner-West San Francisco.) No wonder he was so certain that human beings can't be trusted.

One reason I haven't been blogging much lately is that I feel like my recent entries have been almost unbearably prosaic (or would be if I wrote more of them). I'm not sure if this is an improvement or not. I'm also not sure why I care. I guess I don't want to be one of those people who thinks that absolutely anything she thinks or does is of interest to others.

lumpy

2007-02-11T17:16:00.000-08:00

I've been an absolute lump all weekend. Not an entirely unproductive lump, nor an entirely sedentary lump, but a lump nonetheless. I'm not sure why, but I haven't felt like doing much besides staying in my apartment watching DVDs. I should get together with a couple of school people and work on my Macro problem set tonight, but I'm uninterested in both doing the assignment and interacting with others right now. I'm not feeling depressed or cranky, just, I don't know, lumpy.

The good news is that I can still do ten-key by touch while in lump form, and as a result I finished making the necessary revisions and additions to our data. I would say that the data is finally complete, but that's not true, because we still need info from IMED on when each area first had access to credit. But the data is really, really close to being complete. It was good that I went back through each survey, because I caught a couple of data entry errors that I had made, and I was able to make sure that information was interpreted and entered in a uniform way by E, M, and me. As I'm sure I've mentioned at least once, our data consist of 420 borrowers, with a time span of anywhere between 2 and 15 years (depending on age) for each borrower, giving us a total of 5450 observations (an "observation" is a single borrower in a single year). For each observation there are 34 variables, which doesn't include E's child schooling variables (of which there are 3 for every school-aged child in the household) or the variables that identify year, borrower, and borrower group. The point is, it's a lot of numbers in little boxes, and there's still a tiny part of me that's like, "dude, when did I become the kind of person who puts numbers in boxes and manipulates them mathematically?" But clearly I've been (or been becoming) that person for a while, so it's just about time to get over it.

I decided to visit Bakersfield over President's day weekend, which works nicely because I'll have an even longer weekend than normal and Amtrak seems immune to holiday weekend price hikes. I'll need to work on my thesis while I'm home, but it's a chance to see the fam and an inexpensive change of scenery.

And now I'm going to go be lumpy somewhere outside of my apartment before it gets totally dark.

Speaking of lumpy things, this is my "new" futon, which I inherited from E when he went to D.C. Its cushion is a bit lumpy, and I've spent most of my time as a lump sitting on it.

the 100th post spectacular

2007-02-05T01:22:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the j-curve's 100th blog entry. So much blathering on about India and economics and boys and the random minutiae of my life, and I couldn't have done it without you, my loyal readers. To quote Homer Simpson (in the episode where he becomes obese so that he can be legally disabled and work at home, upon the dedication of his remote work station): "Thank you for your pity." Really, though, blogging is fun, and I'm happy that y'all are still reading from time to time.

I probably shouldn't have chosen 1:30 a.m. as the time to start this post. It probably won't be very spectacular, since I'm getting sleepy already. But I'll give you a quick rundown of my weekend, and then a few more Belize pics.

I got quite a bit of work done on our data (entering the last couple surveys, compiling the data that each of us enetered into a single spreadsheet with consistent formatting, making some of the changes recommended by my advisor, etc). I wish I could say that it's finished, but I have to go back and add some dummy variables for type of business, and I have to correct some inconsistencies in how I entered what year certain things happened, because I realized that somewhere along the line I changed the way I was doing it. I'm hoping all that can be completed in another day or two. I finally did laundry and some other random chores, and I worked on my macro reading, so all in all it was a reasonably productive couple of days.

I dragged the still-jetlagged and majorly stressed DWE out on Friday and Saturday night to hang with my school peeps. Friday was just drinks at the Pig and Whistle, but Saturday we went to a salsa club. DWE is very unenthusiastic about participating in dance that involves specific steps (as opposed to, say, just gettin' down with one's bad self, which he doesn't seem to love but is at least willing to do in the right context and with some mild coaxing). The husband of one of my dear classmates taught me to salsa. It's not terribly hard, and he was a very good teacher, but it takes some getting used to. I also danced with JSOC for a little bit; he loves to salsa and was out on the dance floor all night. I ran into a friend that graduated from IDEC last year; I didn't even know she was still in town, and it turns out that she works two blocks from where I live, which is neat. It was really good to catch up with her a bit.

I hung out with DWE for a while tonight, but due in large part to his work-induced stress (there are major changes/expansions/challenges/etc happening in his company right now, and much of the responsibility for making things happen falls on his shoulders), he's increasingly needing time to himself. Sometimes it is disappointing, because he's out of town so often that when he's here I want to see him as much as I can. On the other hand, his need for alone time is completely understandable (especially since his job, particularly while he's out of town, very often has a social component that takes up many of his evenings). And tonight, for example, I didn't even really mind that he didn't come over. I've become increasingly greedy about my own alone time, and I'm feeling a lot of urgency about working on my data, especially since I found out yesterday that I will indeed be presenting my research at the Pacific Development Conference (as will three of my fellow IDECers and two of the department's professors, including my advisor).

Enough about school and stress and all that. Let's pretend I'm back in Belize instead:

"Go Slow": The island's ubiquitous motto.

This is the guest house where we stayed. Our room was on the top floor, left hand side. From the patio, you looked out onto the ocean to the east, but if you walked to the right side and leaned over the railing just a touch, you could also look at the ocean to the west. Very weird being on such a skinny strip of land.

This is just sort of a typical island view: palm trees, a pier, really blue water, and a bit of a charming, worn, windswept feel to everything.

This is Leo, a little kitten that DWE befriended on the beach while I was scattering the little bit of my dad's ashes that I brought (as is my new travel custom). The kitten followed DWE over to me and he (DWE, not the cat) said, "This is Leo." I asked DWE how he knew the cat's name, since he wasn't wearing a collar. DWE had just made the name up. Anyway, Leo was adorable, and he climbed right in my lap and loved all over me, and was not creepy and flea-infested like the cats in India. I wanted desperately to smuggle him back to the US in my suitcase.

Leo loved DWE too (although not as much as me), but he (Leo, that is) was sort of done posing for pictures by the time I took this one. DWE wore that stupid hat all weekend, because he needed a haircut and thought his hair looked "poofy".

venting a little anxiety

2007-01-31T01:57:00.000-08:00

I spent an hour and a half on the phone with my advisor yesterday (you'll recall that he's on sabbatical in Santa Barbara, so I can't just go to his office) talking about my thesis. The conversation was in general positive, helpful, and even a bit comforting, but I'm feeling totally overwhelmed by how much work I need to do before the development conference on March 17th. I submitted my paper title and abstract to the conference chairs today; there is some chance that they won't accept my paper for the conference, but based on what I know, that's fairly unlikely (not because I'm fabulous, but rather because they are generally not overwhelmed by potential presenters, and I think they like to have students present). So between now and then I need to pry some additional information out of IMED, which means that I have to give them some kind of summary of our findings, which they've been bugging us for. The problem is that there's so much data and we don't have much in the way of coherent results at the moment, so I'm not entirely sure what to give them. I guess just some descriptive statistics (this percentage of people that we surveyed bought a TV since they got credit, etc), but coming up with that stuff will actually probably be a lot of work, and I'm not entirely sure how to do it either in Excel or Stata (partly because I don't know those programs as well as I should, and partly because it's tricky to do stuff like that with panel data). Anyway, I also have to go back through every survey and add some more variables and make some changes to existing variables. And then I have to run a bunch of econometric estimations and tests that I only sort of understand. And then after that I have to run my regression model in a bunch of different ways, and make neat little graphs to go with everything.

I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining. I'm actually feeling very enthusiastic about my thesis at the moment. I don't mind doing the work, I just wish I felt like I knew what I was doing a little more. But I suppose the point of school is that you don't know what you're doing and then you learn. I keep forgetting about that.

The good news is that I'm staying on top of my regular schoolwork pretty well (which is not, you know, super-difficult when one is only taking two classes, but still), so I can spend some serious time focused on my thesis without too much other stuff hanging over my head. The fact that I am attending five classes total (the two I'm enrolled in, the two I'm auditing, and Undergrad Econometrics, which I'm TAing) is actually in some ways helpful, because I can multitask during the three I'm not being graded on, and I'm on campus a lot, which encourages me to work in the time between classes.

Okay, I need to get to bed. Probably by Thursday or Friday I'll have a chance to post some more Belize pictures and tell ya'll more about the trip.

"gay" bands

2007-01-26T21:38:00.000-08:00

DWE saw a link to this website on a political blog, and it's bizarre enough that we're not entirely convinced that it isn't a spoof. If it isn't, it's equal parts disturbing and funny. Disturbing 'cause, you know, God hates queers, pop culture makes you gay, etc. Funny because of the lists of "safe music" and "gay music" (aka "music to watch out for"). I'll leave you to discover and enjoy the amusing and eclectic collection of "gay" music for yourself, and comment on just two things:

One, why is Cyndi Lauper filed among the more or less "Christian" bands as "safe"? Because let me tell you, sister, when I saw Cher in concert (yes, I saw Cher in concert...laugh all you want, but it was, as promised, the Cherest Show on Earth), Cyndi opened for her (she was excellent, by the way) and when she sang "True Colors" she brought a big ol' rainbow flag on stage and waved it around, much to the delight of the audience, which was probably 75% gay guys.

The second thing is the one that got me riled up enough to write this blog entry. One of the people on the "gay music" list is Clay Aiken. I am aware that Clay has many stereotypically "gay" mannerisms and that it is widely speculated that he is gay. However, unless I've missed something, he continues to deny that he is gay, and as you know, I don't believe that someone is gay unless they say they are, no matter how much of a homo they act like. Furthermore, Clay professes beliefs and opinions consistent with fairly conservative Christianity, including a belief that homosexuality is wrong (although he seems to take a generally tolerant, loving stance toward all people, unlike this website).

Even if Clay is gay, he's chosen either to hide it, or to live as a straight/abstinent person. If the latter is true, that's his choice, based on his beliefs, and no one has the right to call him gay or tell him to behave otherwise. He has every right to act in accordance with his beliefs, and for this supposedly "Christian" website to label his music as somehow "dangerous" because of the Hollywood gossip mill or the fact that he flat-irons his hair is totally dispicable. Clay's music and public statements generally promote values that many people identifying as "Christian" would support, and the fact that this stupid, mindless website would implicitly attack the sincerity of Clay's faith in such a careless and utterly baseless way is totally disgusting to me. (Yes, the whole website is disgusting to me, and much of the rest of the list seems largely careless and illogical, but for some reason the Clay thing really sticks in my craw.)

unbelizeable

2007-01-26T20:48:00.000-08:00

First, a confession: like the tacky, unrepentant American tourist that I am, I bought a t-shirt at the airport that says "unbelizeable" on it. Usually puns bug the crap out of me, but that one cracks me up. At least I didn't get the one that says "You better Belize it" on it.

As I may have mentioned, we stayed on a tiny island named Caye (pronounced like "key") Caulker (apparently the name derives from the caulking they used to use to seal boats...man, do the British suck at naming stuff). It is very touristy insofar as tourism is essentially the only industry (other than a little fishing, what else can you do on an island a couple miles long, less than a mile wide, and in the middle of a gorgeous ocean?). It is very untouristy, however, insofar as virtually all of the places to stay, eat, etc. are all unpretentious, rough-around-the-edges, casual little mom-and-pop places. No chains, no huge hotels, no golf courses or swimming pools or other resort-y trappings. Very mellow and cool.

Our initial intention was to take a taxi from the Belize airport to the dock where the water taxi (i.e. boat) departs for Caye Caulker and Ambergris Island, a larger, more built-up island centered around the decently-sized town of San Pedro. (Fun trivia fact: remember "La Isla Bonita" by Madonna? "Last night I dreamt of San Pedro"? That song is about Ambergris Island.) However, we discovered once we got on the ground (actually, DWE saw it from the plane, but we confirmed it once we were on the ground) that the road from the airport was washed out, so it might have taken us hours to get to the water taxi dock. So instead we decided to fly to Caye Caulker. It's a ten minute or so flight on a teeny little winged deathtrap run by a teeny little domestic airline named Mayan Air (random thing that cracked me up: there is another either domestic or Central American airline flying out of Belize called "Taca Air", but every time I looked at the sign I thought it said "Taco Air").

Anyway, there are lots of pictures to show you, and lots of stories to tell, but I'll start in this entry with the pictures I took from the plane.

Some other, undeveloped islands. The dark parts of the water are where there is seaweed growing. The water is very shallow.

More islands and stuff out my window.

DWE, being cute but not very comforting as I worry about our tiny plane crashing and killing us.

This is Caye Caulker. The island was split in half by a hurricane (or at least that's how the story goes...apparently that might not be true) and the half to the left is the one where all the stuff is (obviously). The airstrip is on the very far left end of the island (just out of the frame) and it takes maybe twenty minutes to walk from there to the Split (as they call the place where the two parts are, well, split).

Look how tiny the plane is! We were in the second-to-last row.

...and we're back

2007-01-24T16:43:00.000-08:00

Hi kids. It's been a busy 2ish weeks since my last post. First I finished up entering the rest of my surveys, which was dull but went pretty quickly. Then there were the several days of hiding in my apartment and moping leading up to the 17th, which was the 1-year anniversary of my dad's death. The day itself wasn't too bad, and I went out with friends that night and repeatedly toasted my dad (i.e. drank a lot), which was nice. Then it was a flurry of chores and packing and stuff before DWE and I went off to Belize, which was utterly fabulous. There will be many stories and pictures to come. School started for me yesterday, so I'm rapidly getting wrapped up in that again.

I had my first Macro class last night, and it promises to be probably about as interesting as macro can be, which is to say not incredibly interesting but not mind numbingly dull, either. The professor is I think just about exactly my age, but he seems intelligent and enthusiastic about what he is teaching. Tonight I have Grad Seminar, the class where we essentially write our Master's thesis. I have no idea what to expect out of that class, except for the fact that I'm not a huge fan of the professor.

I realized recently that the deadline to register for and submit an abstract to the Pacific Development Conference is rapidly approaching (less than a week away). This is a one-day conference that I attended last year and I want to present my India research this year, but since we just finished entering our full data set (and actually I still have a handful of E's surveys to enter) I haven't run any regressions or gotten any results with the full data. I also haven't implemented the full methodology that my adviser wants me to use. It's not like I have to have my presentation ready by the registration deadline, but I do have to submit an abstract, which requires me to have a pretty good sense of my methodology and results. So I'll be spending the rest of the week and weekend working on that.

Special note to N: the quote on my myspace page "blurb" is from an episode of The Simpsons. Homer becomes the conducter of Springfield's new, faultily-constructed monorail, which was sold to them by a conman. The brakes fail and he can't stop the train, so Marge, who found the scientist in question while investigating faulty monorails sold to other cities, contacts Homer by two-way radio to offer him assistance in stopping the monorail. The reason I love the quote, in addition to the fact that I find it funny, is that despite the absurdity of the idea that Marge brought Batman to help, Homer has an unassailable point: Batman is a scientist. I'm a huge fan of that sort of bizarre but sound logic. Another excellent example is from the movie Office Space. The main character, Peter, is talking to his mullet-wearing, construction-working neighbor, Lawrence, and they have a conversation along these lines:

Peter: "What would you do if you had a million dollars?"
Lawrence: [deadly serious, and without missing a beat] "Two chicks at the same time."
P: "That's it? Two chicks at the same time?"
L: "Always wanted to try that, and I figure if I had a million bucks I could set that up. Chicks dig a dude with money."
P: "Well, not all chicks."
L: "Type of chicks that would double up on a dude like me do."

It's so true.

68 down, 78 to go

2007-01-11T11:53:00.000-08:00

I'm entering surveys like a madwoman now. I did 25 on Tuesday, 43 yesterday, and I'm going to see if I can do the last 78 today (yeah, it probably won't happen, but it's a nice fantasy).

Embarassing and annoying anecdote: I forgot that it was Wednesday yesterday and as a result I forgot to go the therapy. Embarassing because I don't know what day of the week it is. Annoying because I have to pay for a missed session anyway (and don't get reimbursed by insurance because I didn't actually go).

I hope the Portland contingent of my readership is staying warm on those 20-degree nights. DWE is currently in St. Helen's, insulating the water pipes in his house so that the water will actually stay hot between when it leaves the water heater and when it comes out of the shower head, which I'm sure his tenant would appreciate right about now. The overnight lows have been getting down into the 30s here, but I still have been sleeping with my windown halfway open (I'm telling you, that loft bed is like a freakin' oven). Friday it's supposed to get down to 31, so we'll see how that goes.

It's data entry time...

the not-so-cute couple

2007-01-08T16:18:00.000-08:00

JSOC took some pictures when I dragged DWE to the Pig and Whistle last semester, and he just emailed them to me. It turns out that we're not the two most photogenic people in the world, but I'm foisting our somewhat homely cuteness upon y'all anyway.

Speaking of DWE, I found out something scandalous: he can't swim! He has a moderate and self-described "irrational" fear of the water (this all goes back to a traumatic swim lesson experience in the second grade, apparently). Having all sorts of irrational fears myself, I have neither the desire nor the standing to criticize this particular trait, especially since it sounds like he's willing to work on it. On the other hand, I'll probably end up snorkling by myself, or hopefully with some friendly strangers.

Me and DWE. If he were capable of looking at the camera, he would look quite handsome. That monkey on his shirt creeps me out, though.

Me looking terribly cute with JSOC, who was apparently pretending to be full of ennui.

currency, howard dean, and amateur haircuts

2007-01-07T19:58:00.000-08:00

The first week of 2007 has been about as unexciting as the last week of 2006 was. A little more quality time with DWE, a lot of sleeping, and a bit of productiveness. Today was the first day in at least a week that I didn't take a lengthy nap, so I'm hoping that my increasingly bizarre and inconvenient sleeping schedule will start to get back on track. I guess since I'm not in school it doesn't much matter when I sleep, but it's harder to get stuff done in the middle of the night, and when I sleep during the late afternoon and early evening it tends to isolate me from other people (which I haven't minded up until now, but am starting to mind more).

E, M, and I finalized the details for how the survey data should be entered and divied up the 350 or so remaining surveys, so I've started to work on that. At this point I'm just making the necessary changes and additions to the data that I entered last semester. I have one more chapter left in the increasingly boring financial markets book; for as many differences as there are between the markets for currency, money, bonds, equity, and derivatives, there are also quite a few similarities, so the book is starting to feel especially repetitive. (Yes, "currency" and "money" are different in this context--it's people trading one currency for another versus people engaging in short-term borrowing, which is sort of like buying and selling cash.)

I got together with school people on Thursday night, which was nice, especially since I hadn't seen several of them since before Christmas. I also managed to get a free cab ride home, since I shared a cab with this guy that insisted I didn't have to pay for my part of the ride because I'm a student. I met the guy at the bus stop, where JSOC and H were waiting with me (despite my repeated insistence that they should go home). I think maybe the guy who hailed the cab thought JSOC and H were some guys I'd picked up at a bar that were sort of harassing me, and that he was rescuing me from them, because when we got into the cab he said, "who were those guys?" I guess most of the intoxicated women he sees at bus stops late at night don't have a young Korean guy and a young Colombian guy with them (sucks to be those women...).

Okay, usually I try to be discreet about other people's business on this blog, but I just have to blab this one thing, because I'm all impressed and star-struck about it. Muffin's boyfriend-type-person took him to D.C. recently, where they had breakfast with Howard Dean! The boyfriend is total buds with Howard, and was his California campaign manager when Dean was running for President. Anyway, Muffin said Howard was really cool and nice and interesting to talk to.

While some people were meeting powerful politicians, I was at home watching The Simpsons and trimming my own hair. Yes, I know it sounds like a bad idea, but I think it worked out okay. I did the back by flipping my head upside down, and I even layered it a bit toward the front. I'm pretty broke until I get my student loan later this month, so I didn't want to pay for a haircut, but the split ends were making me crazy (it had been more than a year since my last cut, which is scandalous). I also dyed it a darker and more uniform brown. As far as I can tell it looks fine.

Okay, back to data entry.

happy new year

2007-01-01T12:48:00.000-08:00

The last days of 2006 were mellow and sort of lazy ones for me; hence the lack of posting. I had a very nice Christmas in Bakersfield, complete with the requisite viewing of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and the consumption of huge amounts of Chex Mix. I had lunch with N while I was in Bako, which was lovely. I ended up taking the train back up to SF because United cancelled my return ticket, a fact which was not reflected on their website or their automated phone system (and I couldn't get through to a human because of the Denver airport closure). I raised my voice to two different United employees, and swore never to fly their airline again (it will be difficult to make good on this promise, because they are the only airline that flies direct from SF to Bakersfield, but I'm feeling indignant enough to be willing to put up with Amtrak).

My winter break has yet to acheive its desired level of productiveness. I'm almost done putting together a jigsaw puzzle that I got for Christmas, and I've spent a lot of time worrying about what I'm going to do after I graduate, which is time consuming if not actually productive. I'm plowing through a scintillating book on financial markets, so if anyone needs to know anything about options markets or bond yields, I'm your girl.

DWE has had a highly unusual stint of being-in-town-ness, so I've been spending a lot of time with him. We saw this crazy band that one of his coworkers is in (I'll blog about it more later; for now I'll just say that the band members wear scary-looking muppetish monster heads). The other day when the weather was nice we took a scenic drive down the 1 to San Jose (which I now know the way to, or at least the back way to), where we ran errands at Target and Home Depot like a suburban married couple. Creepy.

Our New Year's Eve was low-key but highly enjoyable; we went to a pub called Edinburgh Castle and saw a band that does early punk covers. They had a kind of hard cider that I'd never had before, Strongbow, on tap, and I enjoyed several pints of that.

One of my grad school buddies is having a little get-together this afternoon, so I need to get going to that. I hope everyone had a good New Year's Eve.

nutcracker part 2, etc.

2006-12-22T19:04:00.000-08:00

So, The Nutcracker was excellent. Great sets and costumes, wonderful dancers, and I had forgotten how beautiful some of the music is. I was particularly impressed by the Sugar Plum Fairy and her dude, and the Russian dancers. There were also some kind of cool visual effects; nothing that exciting, just stuff that would impress kids, but it impressed me too (they did this thing where they stacked a bunch of presents on top of each other, spun the stack around, and then the wind-up toy ballerina came out of a door in the stack of boxes...I still can't figure out how they did it...). The snowflakes (all caucasian, by the way) were also really good, but I spent the whole time they were on stage feeling stressed out because they had this fake snow falling while the snowflakes were dancing on point (that's where they dance on their tiptoes in those special shoes, which don't exactly have fabulous traction) and I kept imagining that one of them would slip and fall down.

In other news, I made it to Bakersfield, but not without a minor glitch. I was up late on Wednesday night finishing grading, and I didn't leave my apartment early enough to catch my flight. I just missed the BART train I was trying to take, and by the time I got to the airport, it was too late to check into my flight (normally it wouldn't have been a problem, but given that it's so close to Christmas, they probably had people flying standby, so I imagine they released my seat when I hadn't checked in by 30 minutes before the flight). In retrospect, I should have checked in online, but unfortunately it didn't occur to me to do that. At any rate, my chances of getting on a later flight were pretty much nil, so I rode BART back downtown and took the train instead. I'm still taking my flight home, though (assuming I don't miss that one too).

Speaking of flying, DWE and I are taking a trip the weekend before I start school again (a perk of dating someone with nearly a million frequent flyer miles, I suppose). He just emailed me the itinerary; we're going to Belize, specifically to Caye Caulker, a tiny island in a chain that forms the Belize Barrier Reef (largest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere). I've never been to Central America before (Belize is between Mexico and Guatemala), and it will be warm and beautiful there, but mostly I'm just excited to be spending four days with DWE, given how often he is out of town.

It is neither warm nor beautiful in Bakersfield, but I'm having a nice time anyway. Last night we (my mom, my brother, my sister-in-law, and me) drove around looking at Christmas lights and then went out to dinner. Today I've been mostly catching up on my sleep and my cable TV.

the nutcracker part 1

2006-12-18T13:20:00.000-08:00

I'm going to see The Nutcracker on Wednesday afternoon. As you may know, when I was a young child, I took ballet lessons, and I got to be in the local production of The Nutcracker (which was put on by the place where I took lessons) for many years. I was, as you can imagine, not a very good ballerina (okay, I sucked), but I did love getting to watch the other dancers who were actually good. I haven't seen The Nutcracker since I was a kid, so I'm very excited about it.

Speaking of which, I was reading a column in the Sunday NYT yesterday called "The Ethicist" where people write in with ethical dilemmas. A woman wrote in to say that she had just seen a production of The Nutcracker and that the Snow King, as well as one of the snowflakes, were played by black people, and that this had, for aesthetic reasons, ruined the entire production for her. (She compared it to casting a "one-legged midget" as Tarzan. Seriously. I can't make this shit up, people.) She wanted to know if this meant she was racist. My answer would have been "you're not racist, just retarded," but "the ethicist" was somewhat more tactful than that (I think he told her that she was exercising a sort of racism, but it was the preconceived attitudes sort rather than the virulent hatred sort). I don't think we had a Snow King or snowflakes in the Bakersfield production, so I can't speak on that point directly, but we did have an either black or biracial (I'm honestly not sure of her racial heritage) Sugar Plum Fairy, and no one seemed to mind that she wasn't purple. (Interesting but pointless side note: she later went on to date one of the housemates on an early season of The Real World, at which point I think she was a professional ballerina.) Regarding the offensively pigmented snow people, the ethicist pointed out that given that the "snowflakes" weren't made of frozen, crystaline water, the viewer was already being asked to suspend some level of disbelief, and that the woman just needed to learn to do a little better job of it. In some ways I feel for the woman, because clearly she places a high value on the continuity and sameness that the tradition of The Nutcracker represents to her, and I don't think there's anything inherently bad about that. But there's only so much continuity and sameness that a constantly-changing society can (or should, I think) maintain. And seriously, do "white" people really look that much more like snow? Wouldn't you really need to slap some white makeup on someone of any race to make them look like snow?

post-semester blahishness

2006-12-16T23:30:00.000-08:00

Well, I've conquered another semester. I suppose you could say I have smitten it (not that smiting two classes is the hardest thing in the world). I'm still working on grading (which doesn't count, because it's my job, not school), and even though my econometrics paper is done and turned in, I'm still very much thinking about it because it's just one of the many continuing steps in the process of writing my thesis. But given that I generally like my thesis project, I'm not annoyed by the lack of closure.

Speaking of my thesis, I got a bit of indirect good news. First of all, I'm not sure if I've explained this before, but we're using a somewhat novel technique to create our dataset. We administered surveys only once to a variety of individuals, which normally yields a cross-sectional data set: many observations (borrowers) compared to each other at a single point in time. This is in contrast to time-series data, which is a single observation (say, a country) examined over multiple periods of time. If you collect information about multiple individuals (or countries or whatever) at multiple time periods, then you have panel data--it is both cross-sectional and longitudinal. What we have created is what's called a back-cast panel: we asked borrowers about things that happened in the past and when they happened, and used this information to construct panel data (i.e. in 2004 this household acquired a TV). We will also be creating "lag" variables, which allow us to look at a particular window of time before and after a borrower first got access to microcredit to see how likely they were to have, say, purchased a business asset during that time period. I won't go into the monotony of explaining how the lag variables work, but I will say that you end up with neat line graphs that show, hopefully, something like a big spike in the number of people acquiring productive assets 2 years after they first got credit, or something like that. Not only do you see if credit is effective, but you see if its effects are immediate or if they take a while to kick in.

Back to the sort of good news. This technique was suggested to us (okay, it was basically forced on us, but I don't have any better ideas so I'm not complaining) by my advisor. He and a colleague at UCSD just wrote a paper using the same technique on data collected by a guy that graduated from the IDEC program last year. The paper tied for first place in an impact assessment contest sponsored by USAID, which has been promoting research related to microfinance in the last several years. The people who gave the award described the paper as being "notable for its innovative use of recall data of highly memorable events to create a methodologically rigorous impact assessment approach that holds significant potential for widespread applicability." The reason that this is good news for me is that it will lend the glow of legitimacy and rigor to my own paper. The technique is new enough to still be interesting and novel, but it has also gained some acceptance in the field of microfinance impact analysis.

I was supposed to go to a party tonight, but I've been rather moody and antisocial all weekend. Last night I was mired in one of those feeling-sorry-for-myself places, but at the moment I'm feeling content to be at home and feel a bit on the gloomy side; after all, I could be doing something more "fun" if I wanted to, but I'm not, so evidently I don't really want to have fun right now. I also don't feel very much like drinking, which I would probably end up doing at the party.

Maybe I'll take a bath. I bought some French chamomile soap at this little co-op in SoMa (I guess it's in SoMa...that area confuses me endlessly) called Rainbow Grocery. The soap smells really good, and it has little slivers of what I assume is chamomile in it, so it's mildly exfoliating. I walked to Rainbow from downtown on Wednesday, I think, which was fun because I got to explore the SoMa/Mission area a bit (in the rain, but that's okay). I saw an X-rated cake bakery, a revolutionary socialist bookstore, and what I assume was a bar of some sort. The bar didn't have a sign, but instead it had a life-sized leopard-spotted cow statue hanging above the entrance. Anyway, Rainbow Grocery was like an independent hippie version of Whole Foods (or I guess I should say that Whole Foods is a slick, yuppie version of places like Rainbow). Just before going there, I happened to read an article in The Economist critiquing the environmental benefits of organic foods, which made looking at all the organic shampoos and stuff even more interesting. But I did buy some organic soup and organic pita bread anyway.

i have to stop googling words

2006-12-12T22:30:00.000-08:00

It's causing me to inadvertently stumble upon websites that eat away at my faith in humanity.

Unfortunate Discovery #1:

I was working on a NYT crossword puzzle (I am addicted to these things). If I get really stuck, I use Google or Wikipedia to help me find answers. I also use dictionary.com to double-check spellings (normally my spelling, as you know, is excellent, but something about the little boxes gets me all muddled, especially about vowels and double consonants). Anyway, I had Google open because I'd used it to find out the first name of the dude that invented the Geiger counter (Hans), and I needed to check the spelling of "alibi" (for some reason I thought it might be "alabi"). So I googled it, since the website was already up. I discovered that I was spelling it correctly, and I also discovered this website. Go look at it. (It's not porn or anything else socially inappropriate, but it may not be a great idea to look at it on your work computer.) Tell me you're not totally horrified.

Unfortunate Discovery #2:

DWE and I got into a little debate on the phone this evening regarding whether "smitten" was a form of the word "smite" (for some reason I didn't think it was, but it is). So I tried to go to dictionary.com to check, but for some reason my browser wouldn't open the page, so I resorted to Google again. That's when I discovered the product being advertised on this website. Again, not porn, and not socially inappropriate in the "widely-understood definition of the term" (sorry...X-Files quote), but it may deeply disgust you. It deeply disgusted me. It made me never want to hold hands with anyone again.

I think I'm going to go to bed now, and hope that the world seems less disturbing tomorrow.

Oh, and do any of you have an opinion about that whole smite/smitten thing? I'm not debating that "smitten" is an adjective form of the verb "smite", of course, but I'm very curious about how a verb that means (and I'm paraphrasing heavily here) "to hit someone really hard with something big like a hammer" begat an adjective that came over the years to mean "adoring in an intense and probably obnoxiously cute way." It's not that I can't see the logical progression, it's just that it seems totally bizarre. Any thoughts? (I'm looking at you, N.)

el numero incorrecto

2006-12-12T19:19:00.000-08:00

I'm sort of distressed that its Tuesday already. On Sunday, I returned from a very enjoyable weekend in Portland. I'm not really sure what I did yesterday. I unpacked, I slept a lot, I cleaned my apartment a little, I caught up on a few emails, I did some reading, I did a few crossword puzzles, I talked to one or two people on the phone...It's hard to believe that stuff takes a whole day. I guess I also watched about a half dozen episodes of the Simpsons on DVD. My gastrointestinal issues persist, although in a milder form, so I've been trying to avoid caffeine, alcohol, and dairy since I got back. Caffeine and alcohol, no problem. Dairy has been more problematic. I made it until about 5 p.m. today, and then I broke down and had a bowl of cereal. I still feel okay, though, so I'm hoping if I keep eating mostly bananas and rice for the next few days, I'll be fine, regardless of my inability to resist milk.

Today I've been grading, working on the econ picture board (no, I still don't have that damn thing done), and even doing a little research on the internet about jobs/interships for when I graduate (ugh...someone shoot me). It's supposed to rain all week, and today it was both rainy and foggy, a phenomenon that continues to baffle me. A good week to be inside with my laptop or a stack of micro finals, I suppose.

So, DWE and I had the craziest coincidence of schedules at the Oakland Airport. On Thursday, his flight to Vegas left at almost exactly the same time as my flight to Portland, so we took BART to Oakland together. He came back to SF on Saturday, and then left again on Sunday for San Diego. My flight arrived in Oakland at 4:30 p.m., and his left at 5:30 p.m. So he was actually able to check in, clear security, and meet me at my gate when I arrived, which was surreal (remember when anyone could meet you at your gate?). Then we hung out by his gate until his flight left. Maybe I'm just looking for a good way to spin it, but it makes me feel like such an exciting jetsetter to be catching 45 minutes of quality time with my man in an airport before we have to rush back off to our important lives (except all I did was go home and take a bath, which was important to me, and probably to anyone who had to smell me, but not really all that exciting).

I just got a call on my cell from a number that I didn't recognize with a 661 (Bakersfield) area code. I didn't answer, because I assumed, correctly, that it was a wrong number. The interesting part is that the person left a voicemail in Spanish. He spoke too quickly for me to understand much, but he said he had some questions and left his number. I wonder if I should call back and tell him that he got the wrong number. Do I even know how to say "wrong number" in Spanish? "numero incorrecto", I guess (it sounds like Spanglish, but I swear that's what it would be).

almost done

2006-12-05T17:45:00.000-08:00

Gee, for a while there, my life was almost as busy as a normal person's. Whew, glad that's over.

Well, okay, I'm engaging in a bit of hyperbole here (shocker!). My international seminar paper, which is completed and turned in, probably took me longer to write than any previous 20-ish page paper I've written. The section detailing the debate over what will happen to the Chinese economy if they significantly revalue the yuan was fairly technical, so I had to spend a lot of time rereading sections of journal articles and carefully wording my arguments (Prof. A has excellent attention to detail and he is one of those professors who appears to know EVERYTHING). It was and interesting topic, though, and it was (mostly) fun to work really hard on something fairly challenging.

Meanwhile, I did both some student tutoring and some grading in my capacity as TA, which was a nice diversion from the paper insofar as the tutoring confirmed that I really do remember how to do 2-firm strategic interdependence oligopoly game theory, and the grading gave me something to do when circumstances forced DWE to cancel on me for Sunday night at the last minute (it's a long story, but the salient point is that he left his car and apartment keys in Pennsylvania--I'd be more annoyed, but people in glass houses, etc--although, I haven't left my keys in another city since college, and I don't believe I've ever left them in another state).

So now all I have left is my econometrics paper and some grading. I played around with my regression model some more today, I checked for endogeneity problems (there aren't any, according to the data, but given that theoretically there probably should be, I find the lack of them equally distressing). I had hopes of writing my paper before I left for Portland on Thursday, but that's seeming less likely, given that I'm not highly motivated to work on it tonight, and tomorrow I have class and then a grad school function afterwards. I have more or less all the parts I need in terms of doing the econometrics, I just have to pick a final model, pull everything together, make it look pretty, and write up explanations and interpretations. It's not due until the 15th, so I'll have plenty of time when I get back, but it would be nice to have it out of the way.

news flash: the republicans suck too

2006-12-02T10:12:00.000-08:00

After the election, I (and a bunch of people in the media) spent some time dissing the Democrats for their attitudes toward and misperceptions regarding international trade. It seems only fair to acknowledge that the Republicans haven't been doing much better, a point which is well articulated in this Slate article. As the article points* out, the Democrats, at least, seem to approach the trade issue as one of economic inequality and insecurity--which in many ways it certainly is--and they seem more willing to promote policies that will address those aspects of the issue (although I don't think it's fair to say that the Republicans are totally unwilling...they just seem to have stupider ideas in that department).

Which is not to say that the Democrats' ideas are great, or that there are a plethora of simple, effective ideas out there that will keep globalization and other forms of economic change from destroying the livelihoods of some people. Most of the ideas that are out there are hard to implement or don't work very well. For example, in one of his comments, N described the way in which the economy in Buffalo, NY, was decimated by deindustrialization. A not-insignificant portion of the problem there is that Buffalo's economy was dependent on a relatively small number of industries. But while it's easy to argue that economic diversification would benefit cities and regions by partially insulating them from market changes, the reality is that I can name ten reasons (well, maybe not ten, but a lot) why the market, as it tends to function in most sectors, promotes specialization of the sort that leads to, say, all the jobs in Detroit being in the auto industry. This is actually just an example of a very basic economic idea: there is very, very often an inherent trade-off between efficiency and equality, and it's usually pretty difficult to pinpoint the optimal mix of the two, let alone make decisions and promote policies that will effectively produce that mix.

Gee, I feel great about my chosen profession right now.

But Jenn, shouldn't you be working on your paper instead of bemoaning the basic nature of capitalism? Why yes, I should be.

*Style note: yes, I noticed the clunky repetition of the word "point". The paper I'm writing is one of those that lends itself to repetition of words and phrases, and I've been driving myself nuts trying to deal with it, so I'm letting it go here.

finals

2006-12-01T23:59:00.000-08:00

Sorry for my absence. I know you're all devastated when I don't post. =) The combination of having a lot of school work to do and not feeling particularly communicative were the causes of my little eight-day hiatus.

I'm in full end-of-semester mode, which isn't so bad when one is only taking two classes. I'm also experiencing an unusual level of motivation, coming primarily, I think, from my intense urge to just be done with everything. It's kind of odd. For example, we have one more problem set due in Applied Econometrics. We already took the quiz on the problem set material (endogeneity and instrumental variables...woo hoo...), and we're all totally focused on tweaking and testing our models for our thesis data, so the problem set seems very annoying. Normally when I'm dreading doing something, I put it off, but for some reason this morning I thought to myself, "I can't stand having this dumb problem set hanging over my head for another day." So I worked on it for a few hours and got about three-fourths of it done. Then I emailed it to H, M, and E (we do the problem sets in groups, and they are my group) and told them that they could finish it and that I never wanted to see it again. I've also been pretty good about staying on my paper-writing schedule. I have a 20-30 page paper due on Monday evening (the one on China's foreign currency reserves and current account surplus), and I'm aiming for it to be 20 pages of pure text, plus graphs and bibliography. I'm also aiming to finish it by Sunday afternoon, since in theory DWE gets back to town on Sunday night. My plan was to have written ten pages by today, and I've got eight, which is much closer than I normally come to goals of that sort. I've dedicated a lot of time to the paper, but a lot of it has been spent making graphs, combing the internet for random little bits of data that I need, and trying to decide on how to organize the sections. I've been worried that it's going to be too short, but I found another article tonight that directly counters one of the other articles that I'm using, which should significantly lengthen (and hopefully improve) the section in which I discuss whether it would be wise for China to revalue the yuan. Ideally I'd like to get up to 15 pages by tomorrow, but we'll see how it goes.

I'm kind of dull when I'm in end-of-semester mode, huh? I feel dull, anyway. I think I'm just tired. Which probably means I should go to bed, since it's nearly one a.m. My sleep schedule has been a bit more "normal" lately (except for last night, when S and I stayed up until 3 a.m. with each other on speakerphone, both working on our respective tasks while carrying on some vague, sporadic semblance of a conversation). I generally prefer getting up around 8 or 9 (yes I know that's very late for many of you), especially in the winter (if I wake up at noon I only get five hours of daylight).

2006-11-22T17:28:00.000-08:00

I arrived in Bakersfield last night. My so-called six hour train trip took nine hours, but I used the time reasonably well (fixing some problems with my data, reading a few chapters of the book I just started, taking a nap, etc). So far things here are typical. Emma is bigger and about as obnoxious as before. My mom and my sister-in-law and I went shopping today and had lunch with my brother, who had to work. I got a Christmas present for DWE, but I'm indecisive about whether or not he'll like it (or, on a more fundamental level, whether or not I even want to get him a Christmas gift...I feel like it might be a more "relationshipy" gesture than I want to make).

At the moment I'm sitting around in a t-shirt and my underwear, waiting for my laundry to finish drying (all my pants are in the laundry). I made the Chex mix and the caesar salad dressing (all while not wearing pants, which I think mildly disturbed my mother). My bro and sis are bringing dessert and the veggie dish, and apparently my brother is also making the stuffing and bringing it over to us in the morning so we can stuff the turkey, because for some reason he doesn't trust us to make it how he wants it (Thanksgiving analogy: Jenn is to mashed potatoes as her brother is to stuffing). So all my mom and I really have to do tomorrow is cook the turkey and make the mashed potatoes (and put the caesar salad together, which will be easy since I will probably also make the croutons tonight).

I really need to work on my International Econ Seminar paper. It's not due until the 4th, but I have to give another presentation on it on Monday, at which point I'm supposed to have it pretty much done (yeah, I can fake being done with it, but since I also have to give my Econometrics paper presentation on Wednesday, I should probably actually have it close to being done). I don't mind the thought of doing schoolwork right now, I just mind the thought of working on that paper. I guess it just still feels big and overwhelming, and if I came up with one small part to work on it wouldn't be so bad.

um, oops...I'm sorry...

2006-11-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

First of all, an apology to you, my loyal readers and commenters. Somehow I turned on the "moderate comments" thing without realizing what it did (that is, prevent your comments from showing up until I approved them). So here I am, feeling neglected and wondering why no one has posted any comments for the last week...thank you to Rebel, who finally clued me in. The comments have now been posted. I think I will leave the moderate comments tool on, because I've gotten more spam comments (one of which I accidentally approved), but now I know to check it obsessively (the same way I check my email obsessively), so all of your insightful and interesting contributions will show up promptly. Oh, and N, thank you for your comments about Buffalo; it's a perfect example of how devastating economic change can be to a particular region, and how complex and unexpected the good and bad outcomes can be. (And I'll take up that discussion further in a later post.)

Gotta run, but just wanted to apologize for not granting you all my "approval" sooner and let you know that it was unintentional. I love your comments and I in no way want to discourage you from making them.

my planty friends return

2006-11-19T20:44:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to report that today was more productive than yesterday (a low hurdle to clear given how unproductive yesterday was, but still). I got a few things I needed at Target, and on the way there (it's a 30 minute BART ride) I did some reading for my looming 30 page paper. I pretty much know the gist of what the paper is going to say, so I'm not super-worried about it; on the other hand, I have to turn that "gist" into 30 pages of well-researched detail, which will take some time. I have a 6-hour train ride on Tuesday (too expensive to fly home around Thanksgiving), so presumably I can get some writing (or at the very least outlining) done then.

I also finally got my plants back from S, who was graciously taking care of them at his office while I was in India (and up until now, obviously). They thrived under S's care (although the one that I bought at Target seems basically immortal: I left it here without water for a month last Christmas break and it looked the same when I got home as it did when I left). The peace lily, which was a gift from B on the occassion of my dad's death (and therefore has quite a bit of sentimental value), is much more fickle, and it's looking big and green and happy. S probably watered it more than I used to (he also only gave it filtered water, and instructed me to do the same, but sentimental value or not, I can't live with a plant that's more high maintenance than I am). The lily needs to be repotted, but the logistics of buying potting soil and a big pot will have to wait for another day.

fat-free half and half

2006-11-18T20:37:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been a fairly blah couple of days. I'm off one of my two medications at the moment, so I've been sleeping a lot and feeling a bit sluggish and unmotivated. You would think this would make me eager to go refill my prescription, but for reasons that I don't entirely understand it tends to have the opposite effect. On the other hand, I'm entering the final stretch of the semester, and I have quite a bit of work to do, so I need to be a bit more on the ball than I am right now, so I'll probably be on my merry way to the pharmacy on Monday.

On Thursday night USF had a graduate program open house, which I attended at the request of Prof. K, who has been my professor for two different courses, and is also the IDEC program's co-director. It was actually kind of cool, because there were a not-insignificant number of people there that were really interested in the IDEC program and what I had to say about it. Talking about my research boosted my enthusiasm a bit, which is good, because I've really been neglecting my data lately. My enthusiasm was further rekindled when E and I (M is out of town) met with our advisor on Friday afternoon. He is, as I may have mentioned, on sabbatical in Santa Barbara right now, but he was in town for various reasons, including to talk to his advisees (I'm not even entirely sure how he's getting away with having advisees while he's on sabbatical, but it's to my benefit, so I certainly don't mind). I may have also mentioned that a few weeks ago, he sent us a copy of a paper that he and one of his colleagues from UCSD wrote using the data of an IDEC student from last year. He instructed us to read the paper, and told us that he wants us to use the methodology used in the paper on our own data. I was a little cranky (okay, very cranky) about the wording of the email and the implication that I have to do whatever my advisor says.

I was, of course, totally overreacting (hard to believe, I know). The methodology makes a great deal of sense, especially given the unusual nature of our data (that it's a backcast panel, i.e. data that was collected at one point in time but nonetheless spans a period of time). Also, nothing else I've done econometrically with our data so far has gotten me anywhere. Obviously my advisor, whose idea it was for us to do a backcast panel in the first place (and as far as I can tell practically invented the technique), is the person to listen to when figuring out what the best way is to deal with the data. I was just not very receptive to the manner in which he made his recommendation (Dr. J's rather astute observation: "You don't like to be told what to do, do you?").

Speaking of Dr. J, I'm mildly worried, because he had to cancel class on Wednesday night because his one-year-old daughter had a 104 degree fever. I am aware that it is not uncommon for young children to get surprisingly high fevers for reasons that are not serious, but he also cancelled his Thursday morning classes, and he hasn't gotten back to us about when we can turn in our homework and take the quiz that would have been on Wednesday night (this coming Wednesday night would be logical if it weren't the day before Thanksgiving, when no one is likely to be around). On the anxiety front, there are also two different friends that I'm worried about, but in both cases I'm increasingly doubting my ability to do anything helpful. And especially in my current state of mind, it's hard to separate out the part of worrying that is motivated by concern for others' well-being and the part that is more about my own generalized feelings of anxiety and guilt.

This post is a bit drearier than I meant it to be. Things are, as usual, generally good, and the things that aren't so good can be fixed or coped with well enough. I get to see my family next week, I get to be dragged out of bed at 8 a.m. to go shopping with my mother, and I get to enjoy my yearly ritual of mashing five pounds of potatoes. (Mashed potato anecdote: I asked my mother to buy half and half for the potatoes. She actually called me from the grocery store last night to find out if it was okay for her to get fat-free "half and half". Putting aside the fact that I don't even want to know what the other "half" is made out of if it's not made out of fat, the whole point of putting half and half in mashed potatoes is to add fat. Luckily my mother caved easily to my "it's just once a year" arguement.)

more pictures

2006-11-15T21:51:00.000-08:00

Me with the hopelessly adorable and loveable baby m at the twin's birthday party in Portland. I never noticed this before, but she's so tiny that her binky looks huge. (Note to A: another reason DWE is a keeper--I showed him this picture, and he said, "wow, that is a really cute baby.")

The hopelessly adorable and loveable B family. In addition to illustrating how baby m ended up so cute, I wanted to show a picture where she looks happy, because she looks vaguely freaked out in the one where I'm holding her (of course, I'm sure it's Daddy, who was the photographer, that was freaking her out, since it certainly wasn't Auntie Jenn).

portland trip, final installment (finally!)

2006-11-15T21:21:00.000-08:00

Okay, okay. Let's get to that last installment of the Portland trip, before I totally forget what I did while I was there. After spending the night at Rebel's, I hung out with My Wife for several hours, helping her pick out ingredients for jumbalaya at the Hillsdale farmer's market and at the grocery store. Then we stopped by the library and I made fun of her for having overdue book fines, because I am a kind and sensitive spouse.

Late that afternoon, we drove to North Portland to meet MJ and Mr. MJ (her fiance) at the brewery where he works (as a brewer). MJ wasn't there yet, so the three of us chatted and lovingly made fun of MJ's tendency to be unaware of the passage of time. I got to try a couple of different kinds of beer, learned some stuff about beer from Mr. MJ, and I discovered that a lager can actually be really, really yummy (keep in mind that the last lager I'd had at this point was that delicious lukewarm Indian Kingfisher). I think my exact quote was "wow, it tastes like a lager...only good." MJ arrived, we chatted more and drank more beer, and then my wife had to get going so that she could make her jumbalaya for the potluck she was attending. After yet more beer, we headed back to Mr. and Mrs. MJ's place so that MJ could start making dinner and I could keep drinking beer and start sending obnoxious text messages to DWE.

Mr. and Mrs. Tissue came over for dinner (I'm running out of initials here, and I seem to remember some joke that involved calling them that, so those are their blog names now), which was really cool because I hadn't seen them in a while. I should mention at this point that the MJs and the Tissues both have puppies of approximately the same age (six months, I think?). The MJs have a black lab named Otis, and the Tissues have, Winston, who is a mix of a couple different breeds and is fairly similar in size and temperament to Otis. When they get together, MJ aptly describes them as a "puppy tornado". That night, they spent literally hours jumping on each other, nipping at each other, slobbering on each other, wrestling around, and occasionally trying to hump each other. After dinner (which was, by the way, heavenly--fish tacos and a really yummy vegan Mexican soup that Mr. MJ made), I sat on the floor in the living room and I got swept up in the puppy tornado, which I didn't mind because I like big dogs and I'm used to them slobbering and jumping on me. It made me wish that I could bring Emma (my mom's golden retreiver puppy, who is just a month or two older) to Portland to join the puppy party.

The next morning, I was thoroughly chastened for having teased MJ, however lovingly, for being late to everything, because were it not for her calling me from work to be like, "um, doesn't your flight leave soon?" I probably would have missed it (did I mention how much beer and wine I ended up having that night?). Anyway, she was sweet enough to drive me to the airport, where we had lunch and played with PDX's free wireless on my laptop.

And then I got back to San Francisco and had to go to class. Woo hoo.

Finally, I successfully uploaded some pictures:

Mr. and Mrs. Tissue with Otis (on the couch) and Winston (on the floor), who were finally worn out from all their playing.

Mr. and Mrs. MJ. Only one of them wanted me to take this photo.

the econ bus keeps rollin'

2006-11-11T22:40:00.000-08:00

See the comments of the previous post for the questions that I'm answering in this post.

I'm sure you could have guessed this, but I feel obligated to say that not one thought that I'm about to express is original to me (well, okay, maybe one or two right at the end). I've taken a couple classes on international trade, and I've done a great deal of reading about it, and that's where I'm getting all this stuff. I was planning to check some sources and get some accurate numbers, but it turns out I'm really lazy, and apparently I know enough off the top of my head to give you the gist of an answer. If anyone wants specific statistics or sources, I'd be happy to dig them up.

1. All that offshoring necessitates is a shift away from the particular jobs that get offshored (I wish the plural of that word were "offshorn") and toward some other kind of job that's still done here. It certainly can have a tendency to shift employment from manufacturing to services because manufacturing jobs are the sort that tend to be subject to offshoring, while traditionally the service sector can't be outsourced (I can't send my hair to China to have it cut--but wouldn't it be awesome if I could?). There are several caveats here. One is that offshoring isn't the only factor, or indeed even the biggest factor, that has lead to the large and oft-lamented decline in manufacturing jobs in the US. Automation has in fact played a much larger role than offshoring in reducing the number of manufacturing workers. Another thing to keep in mind is that, as you know, technology has greatly increased the number of goods and services that are "tradeable"--the obvious examples of services that now get offshorn include call centers, computer programming, and "back-office" stuff.

So if jobs of any sort get moved from the US to another country, the jobs that replace them will either be in a different tradeable sector (presumably one in which the US has a comparative advantage) or in a nontradeable sector. I would argue that someone who loses their manufacturing job, for any reason, is more likely to end up in a service-sector job as a result of their now-obsolete skill set.

2. American workers do compete with workers from other nations for jobs, and the relative wages of Americans versus workers in these other nations obviously factors into that competition. There is evidence that part of the increase in wage inequality in the US since the early 70s is a result of globalization (a larger part of this inequality, however, is due to advances in technology and the higher returns to skilled labor that accompany those advances). So yeah, part of the reason that some wages are stagnant in the US is offshoring.

Given that, however, there are a few things to keep in mind. One is that labor costs depend on worker productivity. So if I'm a Bangladeshi worker making Gap jeans, and I get paid 11 cents an hour, while my American counterpart gets paid $11 dollars an hour, that doesn't mean that my labor is 100 times cheaper. That's only the case if I can make as many pairs of jeans an hour as the American can, and I almost certainly can't (probably because I'm not working with as much capital--i.e. automation--as the American, and I may also have less experience with that type of work). I'm not saying that the American is 100 times more productive than the Bangladeshi--obviously if The Gap is making jeans in Bangladesh (I have no idea if they are--I own one pair of jeans from The Gap, and they were made in Guatemala), they're doing so because it's cost effective. My point is only that wage differentials aren't as insanely huge as they seem when you factor in productivity. And as foreign workers become more productive, their wages rise. (Since you mention countries without minimum wages, I will also point out that if the US had the level of unemployment and the labor market structure that many developing nations had, I probably wouldn't support a minimum wage, because it could very well end up doing more harm than good.)

3. Despite my caveats, I did basically answer your two previous questions in the affirmative. Whether the benefits of trade outweight the costs is a complicated question, but I would tentatively argue that they do. Economists do try to calculate these sorts of things, for example by looking at the cost-per-American-job-saved of a particular tariff. Take a steel tariff as an example--it makes steel more expensive, which makes cars more expensive, buildings more expensive, improvements to the Bay Bridge more expensive, etc. So if you calculate that extra cost to the business, consumer, taxpayer, etc, and then estimate how many jobs were protected, you can come up with some approximation of the "cost" of saving those jobs. Just as an example, I've seen estimates in the neighborhood of $100,000 per job over the course of a year (I can't remember the exact figure and I'm not bothering to look it up, but it was definitely more than the saved jobs paid). So of course economists, who are all a bunch of obnoxious smart alecks (suddenly it makes sense that I became one), immediately point out that you could have just let those steel workers lose their jobs and paid them all, say, $99,000 a year, and everyone would have been better off.

Obviously that's not realistic, and therein lies the crux of the problem with free trade: generally the benefits outweigh the costs, but the benefits are diffused over a large group of people who are each made a little better off, and the costs are often concentrated on a small group of people who get totally screwed over. The Democrats that do support free trade (and probably some of the Republicans too) generally suggest that the "losers" from trade be compensated through retraining programs and other types of government support. This is a very, very imperfect solution, as I'm sure you are aware. It's also a problematic one, because as I've mentioned, people lose their jobs because of technology changes and increased automation more often than they lose them because of trade (and these technology changes generally have benefits similar to those of trade), but people generally don't get as worked up about it politically. This is why I think that things like unemployment insurance and universal healthcare (that isn't tied to employment) are good, because they ease the pain of all types of structural unemployment, not just that caused by trade. (And since you mentioned xenophobia, singling out globalization as a cause of economic hardship--when it isn't the most egregious cause--does have certain troublingly nationalistic overtones, in my opinion.)

As for the more complex question regarding the wage costs versus the consumption benefits, well, real wages (i.e. adjusted for inflation) have been stagnant for a while now. Since inflation is just the change in the average price level, this means that cheaper goods are not making up for lower wages. But again, trade is only one part of the stagnating-wages story, so it doesn't directly follow that the cost-of-living benefits of trade don't outweigh the wage-lowering effects, which at any rate are probably fairly concentrated in a couple of sectors of employment. I might actually look into that one a bit more to see if I can find anything more specific on it, but the bottom line is that it's difficult to tease out what's caused by trade and what's caused by other stuff.

I'm assuming your last question was more or less rhetorical, so all I'll say is this: if we could find a way to redistribute the spoils of capitalism without destroying the incentives that keep capitalism going (or just making a huge, corrupt, bureaucratic mess), then I think it could work out pretty well. On the other hand, I probably shouldn't presume to know what the Chinese middle class want.

Speaking of presuming to know what people want, I will say one more thing about globalization in general. Obviously it's hugely problematic, and although I'm generally in favor of it, I also feel a great deal of ambivalence. Textbook economics says that trade benefits everyone, but in practice things are clearly far more complicated.

But trade isn't the only thing that's far more complicated in practice. There's an anecdote that I read about three years ago, not long after I first got seriously interested in economics, and it's worth actually hauling out the book and quoting directly (especially since I can reach the book from where I'm sitting). The quote is from a Paul Krugman column in the NYT (April 22, 2001), as quoted in Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan (which is a pretty good layperson-type introduction to economics, despite being a bit too conservative for my taste). I would go so far as to say that my interest in economics was solidified by this anecdote:

In 1993, child workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets -- and that a significant number were forced into prostitution.

My argument isn't that we can all feel okay about sweatshops because the alternatives are worse, nor is it that it's the fault of well-meaning Americans that these children's lives were obviously so desperately bad in the first place. My point is just that economic problems are really complex, outcomes aren't easily predicted, and very little is an unqualified economic evil (or, for that matter, an unqualified economic good). In that spirit, I appreciate it when people ask questions and seek to develop more informed opinions about economic issues, regardless of what those opinions end up being.