here comes 2013

I spent quite literally the whole day working (7:30 - 12:30, break for lunch, 1:00 - 5:30, break for dinner, 7:30 - 12:00) and then didn't even finish what I was trying to finish.  I was just too tired and couldn't make myself do it.  And then suddenly 2013 was here, and I was sitting in a room by myself at my grandparents' in Colorado, feeling frustrated for many reasons.

2012 is over.  It went by really, really quickly, as all years do now.  It's funny to think that in a couple more years, I'll look back at 2012 and think, "Yeah, wow, that was a crazy rough year," in that sort of detached way you can afford to have with perspective.  But for now, right now, it just feels like I'm still slogging through the same old crap, and like I still don't know where I'm going or what's going to become of me.  It's still up and down and up and down, although with less frequency than before.  Most days I feel really good about my life, like even if everything is totally up in the air, I'm really excited about all of it, and I just know it's going to turn out good.

But right now all I feel is tired.  2012 has left me very tired, even though it went by in a whirlwind blink of an eye.  I'm absolutely exhausted, and still looking forward to the day when I can look back at 2012 and not feel exhausted and confused about it.

I'm going to try to sleep, and hope I don't lie awake with my wheels turning.  I'm going skiing tomorrow morning, for the first time ever, really, and somehow it feels like throwing myself down a snowy mountain is the perfect way to begin 2013.  I don't know what the hell I'm doing, and I'm probably going to fall all over myself and it'll be mildly terrifying, but you know what?  It's going to be a crazy adrenaline rush, and I'm probably going to laugh my head off when I'm not falling on my face, and when I get to the bottom, I'm going to be so relieved that I made it.

some much needed horn-tooting

I would just like to say that there is something supremely satisfying about teaching myself some fairly advanced statistical concepts.

Perhaps I should preface this by saying that yesterday was rather demoralizing, because my new and improved dissertation experiment procedure still didn't really work.  So I have to go back to the drawing board - again - and revamp things.  And I also think there's no possible way to do what I was planning/hoping to do.  That doesn't mean I can't accomplish the same end using different means.  It's just that... now I have to step waaaaay out of the box, and given the constraints I now know to exist, having done two very illuminating "pilot experiments", shall we call them, I have to rethink how to get at what I want within those somewhat stringent constraints.  It can be done.  I think.  But I don't want to think about it any more right now.

Instead, I am trying to work on my LSA conference talk, which is coming up in about two weeks, and it has come to my attention that I don't actually understand the math behind logistic regression very well.  I haven't worked with logistic regression very much, because I'm usually using normal ol' linear regression.  And now I'm getting these weird error messages that I don't really know how to interpret, because I don't intuitively grasp the math behind the logit transform.

While this could easily cause me to throw up my hands in exasperation and burrow into a little hole ("nothing is going my way this week!"), it instead feels a bit empowering.  I'm reading some tutorials on logistic regression and actually starting to understand things better, and I feel like this problem is eminently solvable.  Solvable problems are truly necessary sometimes.  And once I solve this problem, I will have some results, and that will be seriously gratifying after fighting with my dissertation procedures for the past month or so.

Now I need to take a shower and do some stuff!

a weird kind of progress

As annoyed as I am that I have to re-tool my entire dissertation experiment (that's a story for another day), I must admit that I kind of enjoy playing around with Paintbrush and making scenery for my new and improved experiment.  There are much worse ways to spend an afternoon.

The made-up animals have to play *somewhere*!

Next up: forest.

antsy

1.  It turns out that ants invade my bathroom like whoa when it rains a lot.

2.  It has been raining for 2 days straight.

3.  It also turns out that Windex kills ants.

4.  I currently have an immaculate bathroom, which smells very strongly of cleaning products and is periodically littered with teeny tiny little dead bodies.


Go away, ants.  I hate you, and I'm tired of cleaning you out of my bathroom.

thankful

I am so incredibly thankful for all of the wonderful people in my life.  I had a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Thanksgiving, surrounded by people that I love so much.  It's been an incredibly hard year in some ways, obviously, but it's also been a great year, in lots of ways.  I am continually reminded of just how many fantastic, loving, funny, giving, clever, fun people I have in my life, and I am so very grateful to know them all.  On nights like tonight, I just feel myself wrapped in a cocoon of warmth and love and laughter, and I never want it to end.

Friends and family: I love you all, and I am thankful for the joy, support, and comfort you bring me.  This is such a special time in my life, and I want to savor every moment of it.  I don't know what the next phase of my life will bring, but I know for certain I will always look back on this year, and these people, with gratefulness that our paths converged for a time.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  May your cups and your hearts run over.

Photo by Nico.  (Thanks, Nico!)

I love this woman.

I generally shy away from being overtly political (on Facebook and on my blog).  But I am pretty happy with the way the election turned out, and Rachel Maddow is amazing.

up and down and up and down

Oh my word, what a day.  What a week, really.  3 main issues making me feel like I'm on a mini (not that great) roller coaster:

1) The part time job I have taken on - I don't want to write any specifics about it on my blog, because it's not appropriate to talk negatively about it in a public forum - while providing me with some really nice extra cash, has just been way too much thankless, frustrating work to be worth it.  I put in my notice this past week, saying I won't be continuing beyond this semester.  The thing is, I was feeling really good about the work we're doing after the two meetings I went to this week.  I felt like things were finally starting to move along, we were all making some progress, and maybe it would be worth it to stay on for next semester.  And then this afternoon I get sucked into another backandforthandbackandforth email exchange, and I'm ready to be done now.  So I get to go to another meeting tomorrow!  (grumble grumble)  I will stick it out this semester, but after that, no more!

2) Earlier this afternoon, I found out my dissertation study has finally been approved!  So I was super excited, and I emailed the research director at the campus preschool, and she suggested I call her immediately, which is never a good sign.  I just got off the phone with her, after a very long chat (I just love this woman, she's wonderful), and it turns out UC Berkeley has decided to privatize their child care system, effective immediately.  So people are being laid off and everyone is freaking out, and some of the parents are boycotting the research program because they're totally powerless and don't know what else to do.  I can hardly be angry at the parents, but my immediately reaction is nevertheless, "WHAT?!  Are you kidding me??"  The week my study finally gets approved is the week everything goes to hell in a handbasket, and it is suddenly rather up in the air whether I'm going to be able to find enough non-boycotting children to participate in my dissertation study.  I was already cutting it pretty close, but feeling confident I could be done collecting data by January or so, and now I just have no earthly idea.  What a mess.

3) Plus, as if I needed this day to be weirder, I drove down to the Alameda County Courthouse and filed our divorce paperwork this morning.  Honestly, it was a refreshingly/alarmingly sterile process.  I stood in line for a few minutes, went up to a window, handed over the paperwork, signed some things, and I was basically done within half an hour.  California has a 6 month waiting period, so on May 2nd, I will officially be divorced, and I can finally legally change my name back.  I thought I would be more upset about filing, but it actually feels pretty good.  It's been this weird, supremely unpleasant thing hanging over my head for months now, and I'm pretty tired of dealing with the two last names problem, so it just feels good to have done it.  It's still sad in some respects, obviously, but I've been feeling so sad for so long that it's like my sad muscles have given out.  So instead I just feel relieved, and like it's time to move on now.

You know what?  F*** this day, man.  I'm going for a run.

Go Wugs!

We lost again, but it was still pretty fun.

random phone pictures

I tried to capture the coolness of the view out my kitchen window this morning, but my phone camera just didn't cut it, and my good camera's battery was dead.  The rain/fog was really awesome, and then there was this strip of blue sky below it, and below that you could see San Francisco.  I'll try again sometime, now that my battery's charged.

A car parked on the street right by my house.

Pelicans.  Chillin'.
(See the guy perched on top of the outhouse structure?)

An awesome display in someone's front yard as I walked home from campus the other day.  In retrospect, I totally should have played with the dinosaurs and signed the guest book.  Probably would have made some kid's day.

I'm really tired, but I don't know if I can sleep yet.  I had a really productive day, despite the fact that the amount of time I spent working was fairly short.  I heard back from the IRB (finally!) and I don't have too much to change about my dissertation study before it gets approved and I can start collecting data.  So I did all my revisions and re-submitted my protocol, and I'm hoping I can start collecting data in November!!  Wow, I typed that and then realized it needed an extra exclamation point, because it hadn't really sunk in yet, but that is really exciting!

I also roped an undergraduate research assistant in to recording the voice stimuli for my experiments, and we set a time to meet later this week, and my friend who's drawing my picture stimuli is hard at work on them, so they should be ready to go in the next week, too.  I also managed to do a little bit of writing today, and am hoping to have my methodology chapter done (or at least in working order) by the end of this month.

We lost our softball game tonight, but I was still really proud of us.  We played totally respectably against The Best Team in our league (they actually recruit players... ugh) and had a pretty good time, too.

And then I walked all the way home (it's a bit of a hike from the softball field), and some of the packages I ordered with birthday gift cards had arrived.  Yay new dishes and silverware!  And then I read through a dissertation chapter written by a friend of mine, because she needed feedback by tomorrow.

So now it's time for bed, and sleep, hopefully, and an early start tomorrow.  What a day!  Good night.

winding down

It is wonderfully quiet in my apartment tonight, and I didn't know it when I bought it, but the cheap little globe lamp that sits next to my bed on the nightstand gives off a lovely muted glow.  It's a warm, Berkeley, fall evening - sort of like a cool, Illinois, summer night - but really the only similarity might be the temperature.  It might be 65 degrees or so, but somewhere in my bones, I can tell the difference between the cool breeze that follows a midwest summer thunderstorm, and the cool breeze that blows inland off the Bay.

Out the window, there is the constant low hum of late night traffic, punctuated by the whisking and whistling of the BART train as it passes through the underground station across the street, and the clock in the corner soldiers on, marking each passing moment with its unending series of regular, muffled clicks.

Sometimes I am struck by the sense that I don't know where I'm going, but I sure am going there, and I think it's somewhere good.  Time passes all too quickly these days, but I do try to stop and look around and appreciate the glorious buzz of life that has me wrapped up in it.  I don't know where the weeks and months go, and someday soon I'll be leaving Berkeley, setting off for some as yet unknown new land, where I'll be starting all over again.  It could be scary, but it's not, really.  It's just somewhere else to explore, something new to learn about, new people to meet and love and be annoyed by and keep with me in my heart.

It's a good place to be.  I feel safe, and I feel calm, and I feel ready.  I feel like I can do this, whatever it is.  I can write a dissertation.  I can teach a class.  I can find a research job.  I can move wherever my life takes me.  I might mess it up sometimes, and I might feel like I'm faking it more times than not, but the funny thing about faking it is that if you keep it up long enough, you're not faking it anymore.  Whatever it is becomes real.  So I'm trying to make sure I'm faking the right things, you know?  I'll act like I have a plan and I know what I'm doing, and eventually, I'll feel like I have a plan and I know what I'm doing, and then someday, I'll look back and realize that I did have a plan and know what I was doing all along.  I think.  I think that's how it works out.

My eyelids are droopy with sleep, and my body is tired from exercise, and stress, and a cold that keeps lingering.  So I will try to quiet my mind now, to give it some rest while the clock clicks and the train whistles by, and I will wake up tomorrow and do it all again.