BOBOLOGUE REDUX Yes, it's those lazy, crazy, hazy days of summer (or, as we refer to them in L.A, the hazy, hazy, hazy days of summer) which means two things. First, you are reading Volume 2 Number 1 of the Bobologue, which made its debut last June. I feel a bit like Woody Allen: people preferred my earlier, funny Bobologues. Second, I had my birthday. Just 39, but since then I've already traversed 4% of the way to 40 (i.e. I am really 39.04 years old). When I go to bed, the amount of configuration space available for my shoulders and neck without pain has been shrinking year-by-year; I project it will reach zero by age 43. This millennium sure seems to be going a lot faster than the last one. Hey, many of you got the wrong idea last month. My intuition doesn't tell me to marry Julie Anne. It used to.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ WHAT COMES FIRST? Thesis-comes-first month is being held over for its third record- breaking month. It's going OK, though kind of slow and difficult. I got three chapters done in May, and one in June. Great trend. Maybe I should have gone to Boston. Early in June I had a lot of reading to do and thought I could stay home on a cool porch couch to do it; but around home I get sucked into things too easily. If people can't find you, they can't ask you to do anything. I got my latest batch of anti-depressants mail-ordered to the office. I accidentally dropped one on the office floor, and then accidentally ran over it with the office chair. Pulverized it. The ventilation ducts picked up the dust, and all the grad students were oddly productive for a day or two. Or maybe not -- my sister, who specializes in finding silver linings, pointed out the following UPI story to me: | HAPPY WORKERS MAY NOT BE THE BEST | In the past few decades, the popular belief in the area of | organizational behavior and organizational psychology has been that | happy workers are better workers. However, new research at the | University of Alberta shows that sad workers are more | productive. Psychologist Dr. Robert Sinclair conducted a series of | four studies addressing the effects of experimentally induced | happiness versus sadness on work productivity by asking the | participants to build circuit boards. In the first study, sad | people committed significantly fewer errors than did happy people | -- approximately half the number of errors -- but there was no | difference in the number of boards completed. Thus, sad people were | more productive. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ OTHER STUFF THAT HAPPENED About 20% of the cars around here were flying little Laker flags throughout May and early June. Though after Game One they were flying at half mast. Remember my resolution to eat better in 2001? Me neither. Well, really I am eating a little better. I planned to seek out a completely new diet; instead I'm eating what I ate last year, but a little more of the good stuff and a little less of the bad stuff. At least I know I'm not suffering from the latest eating disorder: "orthorexia", defined in this month's Natural Health magazine as a hysterical obsession with eating right. I was surfing channels and happened on a Ted Koppel show about there being nothing good on television. It was persuasive enough that I turned it off. One aggravating thing about unrequited love is that everyone knows it's not as serious as it feels to me. They nod sympathetically and say, "Yeah, I know what that's like. Well, you'll get over it." True maybe, but it doesn't acknowledge the significance, yea, the nobility, of my heartache. It's the same response as when I have a head cold. How noble is that? As I write this, Dave and the boys are on their annual summer vacation to Portland. I'm lonely, but the house is clean. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ QUOTE OF THE MONTH: "There were two reasons Ronald Reagan wanted to become president. The first was to end the Cold War. The second was to throw out the first pitch on Opening Day." -- Michael Deaver CURRENT READING: I finished Dostoyevsky's _Notes From Underground_, an unbrilliant work from a brilliant artist about the most alienated man in the world. It was clearly anti-Modernist, at a time (1864) I didn't realize Modernism had even been well-articulated. Now I'm reading "One, Two, Three... Infinity", the highly-readable summation by physicist George Gamow of everything scientists knew by 1946.