October 19, 2007
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A return to normalcy
This week has been wondrously normal. Amanda is now home on weeknights as well as weekends. At work I’ve caught up on all the time-critical tasks and have had time to get ahead on long-term projects. I did laundry, I took a shower every day, I fed the guinea pigs, and I watched reruns on TV. Ah.
Tonight, if it doesn’t rain, the Klotzes and Rezendeses are going to Clipper Magazine Stadium (home of the Lancaster Barnstormers, and within walking distance of our place) to watch a double-feature of Shrek the 3rd and The Simpsons Movie from the chill luxury of the Chamber skybox. I intend to drink a beer. If anyone else cares to join us (gates open at 6:30, Shrek starts at 7), I’ve got extra (free) tickets, just let me know.
I’m thankful that memories of Ben continue to slowly trickle out into my mind. I doubt I’ll be able to write the sort of thing I want to write by Brandon’s October 28 deadline, but I’m going to try to write something. I haven’t written anything of substance about Ben yet, and I want to. If I let things get too normal, they won’t stay that way for long, because my grief for Ben will find a way to break through one way or another. So I have to remember to grieve as I can when I can, without requiring it of myself, and to practice what I suppose life will be like once I accept Ben’s death.
I watched two more Bergman films in the past two weeks: Wild Strawberries and The Virgin Spring. In the latter, we witness a terrible scene. How that scene is worked out through the rest of the movie is an achievement of film. It hits hard when the characters agonize how God saw it happen, because we the audience saw it happen.
(I don’t actually find much resonance in the problem of evil as an argument against the existence of a benevolent God. I find myself believing with the Christians that God is seeing what is terrible and doing something about it.)
Tomorrow is my final day-long class in my project management course. I’ve learned the generally accepted methods and the PM lingo. I’ll probably go for my CAPM (certified associate in project management) designation, as a step toward the PMP (project management professional) designation down the road.
Our strategic planning process is on the homestretch, and already planning is beginning to blend a bit with execution. I’m very excited about the direction this chamber is taking; it’s way leading-edge within the chamber industry. And it’s not about being just pro-business.
I’m still working on a Halloween costume idea. I mentioned to some of you the other night how I recently stumbled across an old entry on this blog where I recorded that I was considering “the religious right” as a costume idea. I’m as perplexed about what I had imagined as you probably are. Here is the October 20, 2004 entry, which I find a fascinating one to revisit. I was very caught up in Nader at the time (I still love him, I just don’t talk about him constantly). I also indicated my dream of getting a PhD in English Lit from Cardiff University in Wales. And I alluded to a (then) upcoming shopping trip with Amanda and Julia, where, as it turns out, I punched a Jeep. There’s consistently between then and now, though, too. I was reading Freud, beginning to take psychoanalysis seriously and wondering what it would be like to undergo the process. I had gone with Julia to a Sam Phillips concert; this week I’ve been listening to a lot of Sam Phillips, and just this weekend Amanda and I saw her with John Mallinen at a venue in Gettysburg. I was still fixating on HVAC; when I moved down here I interviewed for a couple HVAC positions, then spent a year in a similar trade. I didn’t like it, and it left me far too exhausted to read old English literature.
And of course, in a comment Tebben uttered those infamous words, “Seattle, eh?” I forget, did you in fact live there, or was it just an extended visit?
I grow more hardcore about Facebook. Also I am reminding myself how regression analysis works. I’ve already reminded myself how factor analysis (love it) works.
Comments (3)
I never actually lived there. But, based on the date of my comment, I think I was in Seattle when I wrote that.
The Religious Right is still a good costume idea. The best costumes are intangible concepts like that.
I don’t want to Say it with a Mini.
Glad you’re returning to normalcy…before you get too deep into factors and regressions though, you might want to read this
(and in general, read Cosma Shalizi all the time, because he may be the smartest blogger there is):
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html
I enjoyed the read, Ryan. I’m happy to report I’m on board with Shalizi’s perspective here. Number one, Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen was an excellent teacher of philosophy of social science as well as history of ideas in psychology, so many of the frameworks I’m already familiar with, and the whole heritability/inheritability thing was drilled into me.
Shalizi writes, “Building factors from correlations is fine as data reduction, but deeply unsuited to finding causal structures.” That happens to be just the thing I’m getting involved with… and not as the one running the analysis, just as one understanding it and helping our execs make decisions about its usefulness.