OF A GOLDEN AGE

in my statistics class we are studying hypothesis testing and how to determine if two samples (i.e. pools of data, in this case life expectancy and heights of presidents: i like presidents! i like height! it’s pretty sweet, though they do not include abraham lincoln because his life ended in an early and unfair fashion) are statistically comparable.

having recently completed a problem in which i decided that two variances were close enough to be considered equal, i wondered: at what point did we decide to declare equal things which are NOT equal? 86.9 and 73.6 are not the same, though apparently they can be used this way when making additional calculations.

this is weird, and a little scary. i need more information.

after scheduling three appointments and feeling really excited for our apartment search, nathan and i felt mixed toward all three places. the one i fell in love with, and that we are going to try to get, we found from a sign on a building in a neighborhood where various people i care about have lived over the years.

we called the number and the woman came over a half-hour later; we saw this apartment first. her name is dagmar; her father owns the building and they handle all repairs themselves. it’s a six-flat less than a block from the apartment where my dad lived when he went to law school. two blocks from the el.

after the hunt was over, nathan directed me to belmont and clark, where we had dinner with his sister and her boyfriend. before that happened, though, we drove down the street where my grandmother used to live. i stopped in front of a blonde-brick building that looked so familiar it made my eyes mist over a little, and i called my dad. “where did grandma patty live?” i asked; “i’m looking at this blonde-brick place and it seems so familiar.”

“are you on cullom?” he asked.

“yeah,” i said, “a few blocks from the place we’re looking at.”

“that’s it,” he said.

the other day, my favorite professor told our class that he generally disapproves of outlining because it can limit a thinker’s ability to spread out and really inhabit an idea wholly.

today, another professor told our class that she highly recommends outlining and does not like when she senses a paper has no cohesion.

mixed messages from the english department at such a tiny school! how on earth will i split the difference in the “Real World”?

the smartest kid (by FAR) in my math class said today that he thought the second part of the course could be better — he thought that he would have more time to devote, and be able to teach himself the material, since the professor certainly is not. like me, this kid has an enormous project that has grown into an out-of-proportion monster. somehow, my three and a half credits have grown into twenty.

as the good folks at mastercard might say: getting to use the word lousiness in your most serious academic project?

“They neither understand his quest for greatness nor comprehend their own hypocrisy in convicting him when they, too, exhibit great lousiness.”

priceless.

american jewish literature and transcendentalism have suddenly short-circuited:

“In stark contrast to Lucy’s brother, Thomas lives a chaste, nearly Thoreauvian, existence in a small, sparsely appointed cabin on the Eden’s property. Bookshelves line the cabin walls, complementing his suitably monastic bed fitted with taut white sheets.”

(from “Revisiting Literary Blacks and Jews” by Andrew Furman.)

• beautiful food
• hot tubs
• extra-long inseams
• down comforters
• the color red
• high heels
• good writing
• the things we say when we’re half asleep
• impromptu dance parties
• old friends
• underlining passages
• noticing things
• this pat benatar song i can’t stop listening to
• emile hirsch
• the elements of editing by arthur plotnik
• diet cherry coke
• my particular brand of madness
• guacamole
• the american beauty score by thomas newman
• how my copy of jurassic park is like the town bicycle these days
• pinstripes
• swearing at belcon meetings
• saltines
• everything is illuminated
• max bielenberg’s handwriting
• a white sport coat and a pink crustacean
• afghans and quilts
• scraps of paper with notes on them
• playing scrabble in the smoking lounge
• ink drawing
• bottlecaps from foreign lands!
• MY SHIRT (as printed by misters f-k and fisher)
• “that lady’s got cigarettes!”
• getting over a cold
• ten more round tables
• steve wright (DUH)
• bass clarinet
• emily miller’s “quirkiness”
• the shawshank redemption
• argyle socks
• those conversations wherein you hear a series of brief, illuminative stories about people whom you do not yet know very well
• gallopy drums
• old postcards and their origins
• this new trend of two beds in one
• living in chicago with nathan after graduation!
• my great grandmother’s homemade christmas ornaments
• how this one time, my mom answered a trivial pursuit question by giving the last line of a men at work song
• really good mountain dew from a soda fountain
• the way eight degrees feels so much warmer than -11
• half-remembered dreams that don’t make any sense
• diet cherry vanilla coke
• patsy cline
• townhouse jay
• surreal nights with funny people
• herb alpert and the tijuana brass
• pool at the chaus
• the idea that potential employers may place any weight on the content of this profile
• frosting fights
• scott’s potstickers!
• acoustic versions
• black pepper
• hating on belcon
• TULLYCRAFT
• goldfish (i speak of the snack food, but the real ones, too, especially the ones with that bubbleheaded business)
• loud patterns
• panda express
• how in my new driver’s license picture, it looks like i am dreamily in love with something just to the side of the camera
• acrylic paint
• round buildings, specifically my cylindrical dreamhouse
• costume jewelry
• large crowds dancing in unison
• www.tvlinks.co.uk, specifically ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK
• charming old books
• fresh haircuts
• ground cumin
• the word “dyspepsia”

yesterday on the radio, miller and i talked about the youth generation, since that was the topic of her thesis. (unlike my thesis, hers is done. haha now on top of my thesis i have a pile of resentment!) we are a generation of low patience, believing it is realistic to want to “get rich quick,” and feeling that — due to the enablement of forums like livejournal — our thoughts should always be listened to with interest.

what seems to manifest itself in a place like beloit is that our generation follows a less-conventional version of what it means to succeed. if you asked me at the beginning of college what i wanted to be, i would have said a math professor or even a high-school math teacher. if you ask me now, i am living day to day and i want to do something that will make me happy. there is a moment in an episode of sex and the city where a wealthy vogue editor tells sarah jessica parker:

“do you want to know the secret to having it all? stop expecting it to look the way you thought it would.”

from the end of an episode of shalom in the home that i just caught:

“we can be a hundred years old and we still want them to be proud of us.”

Cat and Girl, which is normally even more recondite:

“When da Vinci was alive there were like five books! It was possible to be completely read! Now you can read ten times that number and they could all be Janet Evanovich novels.”