THE WAY THINGS ARE

Nothing happened in November.

Emotionally I was unusually stable.  OK, I was stable at a pretty low
point.  But I was able to get work done, even though I felt worse than
I sometimes do when I am not able to get work done.  It was my best
month in 2 1/2 years for thesis progress, but still not enough to
allow me to keep my promise to my advisor that I would defend this
fall.  Oh well, I guess breaking my promise nine terms in a row
doesn't make me a worse person than breaking my promise eight terms in
a row already had.

I decided to quit therapy.  Then I changed my mind.  Not because I
have any sense that therapy has been the tiniest bit helpful in the
past, nor because I think it will probably be helpful in the future.
But because there is some possibility it will be helpful in the
future, and God has granted me the money to keep pouring down this
rathole, so why not try?  It certainly won't do any good to quit.
(Well, maybe it would if I redirected the money to buying video
equipment, an activity that oddly makes me feel better.)

Then I asked all my friends who have found therapy helpful to describe
to me what was helpful about it.  And it all seemed irrelevant to my
situation or my personality -- what therapy offered them was either
something I think I already have outside of therapy or something I
don't see any need to have.  What do you think?

At least I was doing well enough people stopped telling me to take
anti-depressants.

OBLIGATORY ELECTION RANT

I wrote the following paragraph on Wednesday after Election Day:

|  Look, I know modernity is dead, long live postmodernity and all that.
|  But if I might be allowed to make a modernist statement, if the
|  networks had hired statisticians instead of political "scientists" to
|  make their projections, the data would have told them the objective
|  fact that Florida was too close to call.  But you people don't want
|  objective facts when subjective facts are so much more interesting.

It turns out it's completely inaccurate; the networks do have
competent statisticians (more competent than me anyway) and the errors
were GIGO -- some election clerk in Florida typed a number wrong on a
form in the early returns, misreporting the number of counted votes
for Gore.  But I liked the snark factor in the paragraph so I decided
to leave it in.

As a scientist and as a baseball fan, I have found it easier than most
to accept the ambiguity of the Florida result.  In science, we often
do an experiment to try to make a measurement and have to determine
the measurement was just inconclusive -- the size of the signal was
below the sensitivity of the experiment.  In such a case, it does no
good to agonize over the details of the measurement you've already
made; you just get to work to design a better experiment so you can
make a better measurement next time.  In baseball, it happens a few
times a year that your team loses a game because of a bad call by an
umpire.  When this happens, you strut around in self-righteous
indignation for an hour or two, then you go to a bar and mutter in
your beer, "We wuz robbed."  But then you come to your senses and
realize that if the game was so close that it could be determined by
one bad call, your team didn't really play a clearly-superior game and
didn't clearly deserve to win.

Thus, despite the fact that Nader registered a scant 46% behind the
other candidates, I'm willing to concede.

OTHER STUFF THAT HAPPENED

For your holiday cheer, I wrote a song (well, me and Isaiah) you can
download in a popular format the young people call MP3:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~nolty/mp3/prince.mp3

If you pick up a copy of Backstage West this week, you'll find a
casting call for Carrots and Onions.  This is the movie I've been
working on for the past 5 years.  It turns out any schmoe with ten
bucks can place an ad and be treated like a legit producer.  I've
received 300 headshots in the mail and beautiful women are regularly
calling me up to give me their phone numbers.

SHE: ...and we learned the difference between freezing point and freezing.
ME:  That's like learning the difference between stopping and a stop sign.
SHE: If you don't want me to keep telling you to shut up, you should stop 
     saying stuff like that.

Faithful Bobologue reader Dave White, who is a professional movie
reviewer, invited me to a press screening of the new Buscemi movie.  I
got to go to the little screening room with plush armchairs where I
had a separate armrest from Dave, a known armrest hog, and get checked
in by the publicist who was really an aspiring actress or an aspiring
writer or an aspiring something.  I was there when these professional
opinions were being formed:

http://www.ifilm.com/db/static_text/0,1699,7264,00.html

About half of my good friends voted for Nader.  Comparing that to the
national norm, I guess that means I have some weird-ass friends.
========================================================================
CURRENT PROJECTS: Urban Village theater company's first-ever puppet
production, "Song of Mary".  I have been painting cardboard puppets,
editing and printing large-format photos from the web, and will play
guitar during the piece.  

CURRENT READING: "You Know Me, Al" by Ring Lardner -- snarky baseball
novel from 1916.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH: "It is enough that the people know there was an
election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who
count the votes decide everything."       -- Josef Stalin
(submitted by faithful Bobologue reader and historian Steve Kennedy)