lovely

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.