So another semester comes to a crashing and messy conclusion

Jeez. How many of these have I seen. 2 for an associate's, 4 for B.S., and now one down for the Master's. Damn.

Funny, though, how they all end up the same. I end up cranky. I apologize again to my wife for this. Each end comes, of course, with the question, "what now?" Quo Vadimus, to quote a sitcom that currently resides, on DVD, somewhere inside my storage unit. The immediate future has an answer: Thesis. (Doom doom doooooom.) So that oughta be fun.

But also: why? I ddn't have to do this. I had a career. I was good at it. I even enjoyed it at times. I probably have some deep-seated desire to make a difference. The reasons for this are pretty deeply rooted in my childhood. I would call this phenomenon overdetermined. And it's in the face of unrelenting and overwhelming evidence that Franz Kafka was right (Bumpersticker idea?)-- you can't make a difference. But you have to. That's the existential question-- it's in the Plague, and the Phenomenology of Perception and Beckett (I can't go on....I'll go on): Whatcha gonna do? and I guess we all say yes, but some try to be more emphatic and Bloomish, and at that point it's better to black out the text than to ask "why," because the blacking out is at least action, and the asking becomes divorced from action and so a dead end.

So I've learned a thing or two. Cause I didn't know that before.

it's hard to blog

when you are up to your eyeballs in chi-square and Spearman rho tests for correlation and you barely know what this shit is. Plus! populations sample parameters. I don't even know if I know the right term. Damn. Aren't there any good textbooks on this stuff?

the worst possible conditions for studying

The worst way to study is to be on the L platform, while on the other side of the little shelter a dude is cackling and pounding on the divider.