Movies by Theater

I wanted to see how the places I go to see movies has changed since I moved here and how much influence having a DVD player has had on where I go to see movies, so the chart below I think shows that to some extent. Cheap older films can now be rented, so I have fewer reasons to go see such films at the Tate Student Center. Art films, which were hard to find in town but usually showed at Beechwood, are now shown regularly at Cine. (I was surprised to see how many films I likely used to go to see at Beechwood.)

However several other factors influence where I see movies as well. Some entities have stopped showing films, such as the Georgia Theater, which does only music now. Other cheap venues have also opened up, such as the second-run theater at the mall. Finally, the price of films went up to a level that I no longer felt like I could justify attending them at full price unless I was really intent on the movie.

Looking at my list, I realized that some films I just don't remember at all--and often I wasn't quite certain where I saw the film, so I had to make an educated guess. Hence, these charts are to an extent based on estimate from memory rather than cold hard stats. They are broken down between 2001-4 and 2005-11 because 2005 is when DVD became available to me.

2001-4

2005-11

My U.S. Map by Decade

I wanted to see how much where I live affects how much time I spend in various states. It's interesting how the trajectory changes as I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast. The 1990s, where I lived in three different states and did significant in-state travel represent the time when I was present for a time in the most states. The 2000s, where I've spent most of the decade in Georgia fill in a few of the eastern and midwestern states, but the West Coast now has started to look anemic, as the East Coast did when I was younger. One difference: I have family on the West Coast, so there's still an excuse to go back.

In the maps below, the black states are those I lived in during the decade. The dark gray states are those I spent at least one contiguous week in, and the light states are those I at least "touched."

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

So far the 2010s are shaping up to look similar to the 2000s.

IM Chats by Year

When I first got online at home, around 1999, I became an e-mail fanatic. Probably, about six months later or so, I discovered instant messaging, and that became a constant for many an evening for probably a year or so. But the IM usage dropped off precipitously once I moved here. There are likely multiple reasons for that: I have more friends here. I have less interest in trying to get dates online. Chatting online is no longer "new" to me, so its novelty has worn off. And finally, chatting online no longer seems as easy to accomplish as it once did.

By the latter, what I mean is that Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger--these services all no longer seem as prolifically used as they once were. Many folks text rather than IM, or they IM straight from the phone, or they chat via a social network like Facebook, and since one of the main reasons I chatted was to meet new people and Facebook seems more structured around helping you stay in contact with people you already know, I'm not as motivated to chat on it (but see above also: there are a lot of things these days I'd rather do than chat online).

Nevertheless, I present what few statistics I have in this regard, which only takes into account chat from 2005 on, when I got this particular computer. The chat stats for 1999 to 2005, unfortunately, were lost in a crash. By 2005, chat in my life was already in decline; nevertheless, if you can imagine the trajectory shown here going backward, you'll probably see a pattern you could plot out to years before.

The blue line on top represents chats along with chat attempts (often people don't answer an opening line on IM); the red line on bottom represent actual chats. Where the blue disappears, all attemps to chat were successful.
The 2011 chat is the reason for my blog entry. I had a wonderful online chat one evening with a gal I'd e-mailed back and forth with a few times. But to note how my feelings about chat have changed, I really felt more like talking on the phone with her, but more than that, I felt like being out on an actual date. It was loneliness after the cancellation of a date with another gal that caused me to check into Facebook in the first place. A chat, as wonderful as it was, was a poor substitute.

Single versus Married Classmates

I went to a small high school and, as such, knew everyone in my graduating class. For a while after graduation, I even continued to know what was going on in most of their lives. But time passes, and people move away, and then I myself moved away. My knowledge of people faded.

And yet . . . Well, there's Facebook, and there are people who e-mail me out of nowhere, and some of them know what happened to some of the others, and somehow that keeps me somewhat in tune with what's happened the last twentysomething years.

Most of us have married, and lot of us have kids. I'm neither of those. I'm unusual, I guess, but just how much? Let's see:
I'm unusual, but apparently I'm not that unusual. There's a chunk of us who have never married, not once (the guys are a slight majority here). Of course, some of us might have live-in significant others, but I don't know anything about that in most cases. And some of us may have divorced, though I can only think of one I know for certain. And I can only list off a few who I know for certain have children, though I suspect many others do also.

Somehow, I suppose, I should take solace in the fact that there are other never marrieds still out there, but mostly I just think, Why didn't those folks ever marry? Some of them were/are certainly good prospects.

Percentage of Acceptances versus Number of Pieces Submitted

My friend Al has stopped submitting to journals because he finds it a waste of time, given that an acceptance comes to him so rarely--he says it's about 1 percent. So I decided to look at my own rates to see if they were comparable. I was thinking they were about 2 percent, at least in recent years.

So first, let's look at the percentages, with and without poetry (it used to be stories were harder for me to find publication for, whereas in the most recent year it has become just the opposite):
I had a long dry spell in the early 2000s. But I also didn't submit much until about 2008, when I decided no longer to limit myself to my best seven pieces--instead, I would send out the best forty pieces or so (I don't do simultaneous submissions). So the percentages have gone up, I suppose, because I'm doing more submitting, but they've also gone down from times when I actually did receive the rare acceptances. Overall, Al turns out to be correct, however: the general acceptance rate is one in one hundred.

Music Minutes by Year

I wrote a bit of poetry when I was in high school, but my poetry has never been a form that was highly connected to music. It has a kind of intellectual quality to it, the most recent published sample of which is available here at Negative Suck.

Of course, I didn't buy a lot of music before I graduated from high school, a combination of lack of money and parental restrictions (no rock music). Beyond that, my CD collection didn't start until 1992, a few years before I would purchase a CD player--I stuck with tapes until CD players got to be under fifty dollars. So this affects the years for which I have CDs. Also affecting the years from which I have CDs is that fact that I was a radio deejay in the mid-1990s, which means I was most familiar with music during this time, and I believe that is born out in the amount of minutes of CD listening time assigned per year in the following bar chart I'm about to render. Let's see:

Floor Plans of Places I've Lived

I've recently been working on a story that involves much attention to the rooms of a house, which has gotten me thinking a bit about the floor plans of the places I've lived. So here that are, from oldest to most recent. The house I grew up in worked around in a circle of sorts. It's not quite to scale, as none of them are. My bedroom was the smallest, but its smallness here is a bit exaggerated by poor drawing.
The first apartment was pretty swanky, what with a wet bar. Unfortunately, I never stocked it. I was underage for much of the time I lived there and too poor for the rest. I kept motor oil and stuff like that behind the bar. Unfortunately, the place smelled of cats, a smell that never went away. It was located in a pretty nice part of town, not far from the south end of a fancy shopping district and from my job.
The second apartment was a weird one full of octagonal rooms, much smaller--the smallest place, in fact, that I've ever lived, though it's kitchen was more generous than any apartment I've had since.
The third apartment was pretty nice, though smaller than the first. It didn't really offer a place for dining, though.

The fourth apartment is more of a studio efficiency than anything else. Its main advantage is its location.

Long Distance Calls for August

My Music Collection

I don't know if this has any significance whatsoever, but here's an alphabetical breakdown of my CDs by band name or last name of artist.

And here's the same pie but this time by the number of albums per artist alphabetically.

They pretty much match.

Movie Watching by Genre: Video and Theater

On a Saturday night at the end of August, I rented the movie Catfish. It was a film I had wanted to see for a long while that I was waiting to hit the cheaper backlist video section. It threw me into a bit of a funk, so I'm glad I didn't get something more cheery or sexy. I haven't been watching many films lately mostly for that reason, that they remind me how lonely I am. At least I have a number of friends.

Catfish still managed to remind me of such, only it did so not by presenting a world where people find perfect love but where the Internet proves to be a place for deceit and self-deceit. It seems the only type of dating I'm capable of and one that is always fraught with the same lack of success that dogs me in real life, so much so that when something actually seems to be working, I can't help but think there's a catch, because romance simply doesn't happen to me. Does it happen to anyone? It seems to. Friends of mine have girlfriends--and they are gals they actually like.

Anyway, Catfish was the second film I saw in a week, the other being Septian, a film in which a couple of my friends appear (it showed on the big screen one night, so that's when I went). These were the first films I'd seen since February.

I had thought I hadn't seen many movies at all this year, but looking back at my list, I've actually seen quite a few--it's just that most of them have been on video. I've only had access to a DVD/video player since 2005 or so, which means that before then, if I wanted to see a film, I had to go to a theater. I thought it would be interesting to see how home video access has impacted movie watching.

The big movie watching took place in the early 2000s. After I got access to video, it appears that the number of films watched stayed constant for a while but that the video and move theater split the total. In recent years, however, the numbers have gone down for all.

Also of interest is what genres of films I watch. *Catfish* was a documentary. Am I more prone to watch foreign films or documentaries on video than in the theater? Let's see.

Theater

Video

So it appears that the numbers correspond on video and theater somewhat closely, though I am slightly more prone to rent a documentary than see it in the theater. Such makes sense, given the price differential. Even I figure the documentary is going to be visually less impressive and thus something better slated for small-screen pricing.

As for why the numbers drop off. My theory is that I was more motivated to see a film when I had access to movies only in the theater--that is, I had to catch the film before it disappeared forever. Now, I can reason that I'll catch it later on video, but by then, often, my interest has wained.

States I've Been To

I've been to most of the U.S. states. I'm missing, however, a huge chunk right at the top of the country, and another swath in the nation's mid-Atlantic region, as is evidenced in this map of the states to which I've been. The darker highlights represent those states in which I've spent at least twenty-four consecutive hours. The number of states in which I've done this actually surprised me, as I thought there were more states of the type like Oklahoma, where I spent probably just an hour--one Sunday, when I was living in Texas, I drove up and across the border to eat at Carl's Jr., just to be able to say I'd been to the old Indian Territory.



But twenty-four consecutive hours may not even be the best way to describe legitimately large amounts of time--after all, some states I may not have spent a consecutive twenty-four hours in, but I've so often been through them that I probably have spent more than twenty-four hours in total. Another way to think of time spent might be to color those dark the states that I've spent a night in:



To what extent are the states that I've visited a reflection of the places where I've lived? I thought that might present an interesting map in itself, and it does. Notice that I've spent the majority of my life in the band of sunbelt states, and my travels mimic that to a degree. Those states farthest from where I lived are often those I haven't journey to.



If I were to color this map as it would have appeared when I was twenty, before I took a trip by train across the nation, the highlighted states would be almost entirely in the west, like this:



Even after that trip, the other states wouldn't fill in for years, because I was still until age twenty-four a California only resident:



One day, perhaps, I'll get to the other twelve states I'm missing. I hope I don't have to move to North Dakota to do it though.

Second Dates

So after a first date in August, while I was pondering whether there'd be a follow-up, I decided to go review how other first dates had gone and whether there had been follow-ups to those. I'd say my record is pretty good for women not of my religious faith, which is strange--I'd think second dates more likely if we actually share religion, but not the case. What I can say is that pretty much each set of repeated dates has led, ultimately, to a friendship. In fact, sometimes I have difficulty even thinking of these outings as dates, since it was clear we didn't have enough in common in terms of values to make a go at a relationship. But I guess the woman enjoyed my company enough that a mere friendship was fine. Here's the breakdown:

Nonchurch Second Dates

Shared-Faith Second Dates

The statistics grow slightly more interesting with third dates and with friendships developing. With nonchurch women, the level of interest and dropoff stays virtually the same, whereas with women of the same faith, pretty much the third date has been a given if I asked. Meanwhile, friendships with such women, even those who rejected further dates after the first date, stayed in place with about the same percentage as those not of the same faith.

Nonchurch Third Dates

Nonchurch Friendships Resulting Sometime after Second Date

Church Third Dates

Church Friendships Resulting Sometime after Second Date

Online Dating

So back in August I went out on a terrific date with a terrific woman. We met through OKCupid. This came out of nowhere, since I don't really troll the online dating sites anymore, my hope in finding anyone on such a site long since dispersed. The issue is largely that my own values are so out of sync with those of most people that next to no profiles match what I'm looking for. I'm a Christian, but I'm not a mainstream Christian, which means that I'm not really a Christian in the sense that most people are at all. These services always want to set me up with Baptists or someone of that ilk, but there is no way that would work because our beliefs and practices are nowhere near the same. I actually tend to feel more comfortable with nonreligious people, but there, of course, religion is still an issue. One might put me in with the Messianic Jewish camp--it's where I fit in closest with the various "labels" you can find on some of these sites--but if anyone else even fits in that category, they're usually in Romania or some out-of-the-way place like that.

This was a date unlike any I've had in a while. Generally, when I go out with women, I (1) know them pretty well already and so know what I'm getting into, (2) don't have similar values and so know the date is not going to lead to anything serious, even if we have fun, (3) sense that one or the other of us isn't really into this from the get-go, and/or (4) am out with someone in a city far away where the only possibility for a relationship is a long-distance one that probably won't come to fruition. In the first case, it's not exactly like a date in the same way; it's more like old friends getting together. Most of the time, therefore, my "friend" status has already been established (because one or the other of us--or maybe both--has already declared a desire to be just friends), which cuts down on the potential that the event might turn into more; in fact, it makes me wonder whether what we're doing can even be called a date. (When I was younger, such a thing might have been a date--for there were women I went out with who were friends I'd have considered a relationship with--but now that I'm older and more marriage minded, if I'd found someone who I was interested in who knew me well enough and wanted to date me, um, I think I'd probably be married.)

But here was a woman who was attractive, who seemed interested in getting to know me, who I was interested in getting to know, and who I in fact did not know hardly at all outside of a handful of e-mails and a short phonecall and who could actually one day end up living here in this area. One thing I did know, however: we both had similar religious views. This meant that the date could actually lead to a second one. Wow--to date with potential.

(Alas, since then, she's moved on to other places, and so far I've failed to score a second date. But maybe one day if/when she returns.)

So the August date got me to thinking about how many women I've met from online dating sites over the years and which sites led to the most meetings. The numbers here actually skew toward Yahoo! Personals, which doesn't even exist anymore, because most of my online dating was done back when I was in Texas, new to the Internet, and more hopeful (and perhaps a little more keen on dating with no real goal other than to have a fun time out):
That's not a lot, though I did probably forget to include a couple given how many years ago I started using the Internet to try to find dates. It's been very hard for me to get a date from online, but given my rather reserved temperament, it's been even harder to find dates in real life, unless I happened to know the person from a shared activity like school, work, or church. Back when I was putting forth more effort online, I probably averaged one first date for every one hundred women I contacted. Part of this probably has to do with the fact that it was already fairly clear I wasn't a match--because there were no matches to be had.

If one adds singles sites associated specifically with my church, the number of women I've met through online databases, however, would grow exponentially (and is thus hard to track), but the number I've met locally (as opposed to traveling to a singles activity or specifically to meet the person) and gotten a date with (as opposed to exchanging a couple of e-mails that ended up going nowhere) would be extremely small. In fact, I can think of only two in a local area, and in one of those cases, the woman just didn't seem to want to pursue anything more (believe me, I would have had she let me), and in the other, I wasn't that interested and never got much of a vibe that the woman was that interested either. Most often, though, I already know the local women, when they exist, because I see them at church. In the cases I hadn't known them and thus was out with a near stranger, they were in different organizations or I had just moved.

Acceptances, Rejections, and Submissions by Publication Length

My flash "Biology" appears here now in the latest Emprise Review.

I've long thought that longer stories were harder to publish than shorter ones, but at least for me, that apparently is not true--it's only the second under-500-word story I've published. Now it is true that a shorter story can be written faster, and that may be why so many folks write the shorter pieces, but in terms of publication, not necessarily so. That may well be that at the shorter length one has more competition. That said, when it comes to publication, a print journal can publish substantially more short pieces than long ones, which would offset that. Maybe it's just that my longer work is simply better written that the publications tend not to skew any toward the shorter material.

Anyway, in an attempt to see whether my preconceptions were right, I decided to graph a few items. Here is a chart showing the breakdown of how many stories of each length have seen publication:
Clearly, the length that is working best for me in terms of publication is the 1,001-2,000 range. However, a quick look how many rejections I have gotten for each length of story also reveals that for the same length of stories that have gotten the most acceptances, I have also gotten close to the most rejections. The exception here is 5,001-7,500, which outpaces them all; 4,001-5,000 still manages third, however.
Perhaps, it's just that the stories that I've submitted mostly congregated in these same ranges. Let's see:
Indeed, I do have more stories in the 1,001-2,000 range than in any other, but note also the the 5,001-7,500 and 2,001-3,000 come in third here. In that case, 4,001-5,000 is working really well for me.

Let's look at it on a percentage basis. The black represents the percentage of submissions in each length that have actually been accepted. The gray represents the percent of stories of a given length that I've submitted that have eventually been accepted (that is, I may have sent out five stories in the 4,001-5,000 range a total of sixty times, amounting to a 4.5 percent acceptance rate, even while 60 percent [i.e., three] of the stories were eventually accepted).
Interestingly, pretty much across the board of all lengths, I have about 4 percent to 5 percent acceptance rate (really, not too bad considering). The exceptions are the freaky 501-1,000 range (but note also the comparatively few stories that actually have been submitted in that range, as denoted in the chart above) and anything over 5,000 words. Mind you, most of the stories over 5,000 words gravitate to the south end of that, but long length does seem a factor in percentage rejection.

Dreams by Decade

I used to keep a dream diary with a great amount of dedication. Some recent dreams caused me to wonder how the dreams I've been having lately would compare with those I had twenty years ago. And so, I opted to make a chart of the people who have shown up in my dreams over the course of years each separated by a decade.

The years I chose were 1991, 2001, and 2011. This posed a few problems, however. So far, in 2011, I've recorded seven dreams. In 2001, I recorded none. And in 1991, I recorded something like one hundred (I was indeed dedicated). So clearly that wasn't going to work. I did the best I could, by choosing instead of 2001 the year 1999. That year, I recorded three dreams. And instead of all of 1991, I chose to record review only the nine dreams from July of that year. Hence, the decades are now more on an equal par.

I don't know why I should have been surprised, but the people in the dreams varied too much for me to actually chart them by name, with lots of folks only showing up once. Folks who showed up most frequently back in July 1991 included my mom, my friend/coworker/former high school classmate Mike, and my boss Dorothy. A girl I had a crush on at the time only showed up in two dreams that month. No one showed up more than once in any of the dreams for 1999 or 2011.

So I needed a different strategy. I opted to break the dream people into categories. Certainly, some of the categories are kind of a judgment call. Take, for example, Mike. Do I stick him under high school, work, or friend? I opted in such cases to place a person under the category where I first became most familiar with the person, so Mike went under high school (though in the dreams that month, he was most often at work).

Here's how the categories break down for each of the three years chosen.

1991

1999

2011

I suppose some might be interested in the celebrity category. The celebrities to show up in the July 1991 dreams were Will Smith (who was still the Fresh Prince at the time) and Dave Letterman. And in 1999, it was Alex Trebek.

So what is interesting to me about these charts is the way in which the things my dreams obsess about has changed. In 1991, even though high school was three years behind me, classmates from that period still figured most prominently. Relatives and coworkers also did. I dreamed a lot about work, as I worried a lot about it as well.

In 1999, my church was going through some large changes still, and so many of my thoughts revolved around that. By then high school no longer featured so prominently, though strangely, grad school, finished two years before, now was showing up.

In 2011, church seems even bigger, but I can say, from looking over the dreams, that actually few people I know have shown up in dreams this year, which skewers the stats significantly. Most dreams (four of seven) involved complete strangers. Interestingly, high school has left the mix completely, and even work isn't showing up.

But in all years over the decades, relatives show up with some frequency, even though I have little contact with my family compared to 1991.

My Ties

A coworker was remarking on how all my ties seem to be given to me. I think every time she asks where I got a tie, she happens to do so on a day when I'm wearing one that was a gift. I'm the only one at work who wears ties consistently, so they tend to get comments. Anyway, the following chart confirms that in fact I have actually purchased more of my ties than I have been given ties:
Still, I am surprised by how many ties have come to me as gifts. I think, because I wear them, people find them safe gifts for me. And I will wear virtually any tie I'm given. That doesn't necessarily mean that I think they fit my style. Breaking down ties I love versus ties I'm not really into, it's clear that if I picked out the tie to begin with, I'm more likely to love it, which I guess makes sense:
I was also interested in the color of the ties I have and how that affects whether I like them. Here's that breakdown:
So what piece of advice would I give to someone who is handing me a tie? Go for blue, green, or lavendar, and I'm more likely to like it. Green, it kind of overdone, though, as the above shows. I actually tend to like yellow ties also, but I keep their number to a minimum.

Crushes by Hair Color

I've never quite understood why hair color is even something people pay attention to when talking of people they are attracted to. Sure, I might find some blonde gals attractive, but that won't mean all blondes are, nor that I won't find a redhead or a brunette or a black-haired gal even more so. It really depends on the whole woman--figure, face, haircut itself. Add in personality as well--I've seen some very pretty women who fairly quickly didn't appeal to me because of their general demeanor, and a few other less-immediately physically attractive gals have grown in appeal because they were simply so much fun.

Anyway, I very unscientifically have tried to sort through gals I've had crushes on over the years to see if any hair color overwhelms, or if it's more or less even. Of course, there's also the question of what constitutes a crush. There have been girls I was interested in, but I wouldn't have called it a crush--I guess because it was less intense, as she was not someone I spent a lot of time thinking about when she wasn't around me. So what I'm trying to restore to memory here are the women, from high school on, who I spent a lot of time fantasizing about--even obsessing over--the possibility of being in a relationship with. (Unfortunately crushes are what most of my dating life has consisted of. Rare is the girl I actually had a crush on who accepted a date from me, and rarer still such a girl who I managed to score repeat dates with.)

Looks like I'm a guy who prefers blondes. Of course, if we take into account that brunette outnumbers other hair colors, then the preference becomes even more apparent (just as the absence of redheads might be explained by their relative paucity in the population as a whole--the most rare of hair colors). Growing up, redheads appealed the least to me, though I've come to appreciate their beauty in their own right as I've gotten older. I can think of a few I had an interest in--even a strong interest--but I can't think of any who inspired a full-on/lost-my-mind crush, as I'm defining it here.

Writing by Genre and Draft by Year

So August is typically a month I devote each year to rereading stories, poems, and other writing projects of mine to determine what will be submitted over the coming year and what I will rewrite over the coming year. Given that, I thought it might also be interesting to review how many first drafts I've written each year, which genres those pieces were in, and how many subsequent drafts I completed that year.

The following charts indicate by year stories, poems, and chapters of longer projects accordingly. The first chart shows items by genre, with first drafts versus later drafts split out on each bar. The second chart shows items by first draft versus later drafts with items split out by genre on each bar. Finally, the third chart breaks everything out. Poems are a bit of an odd creature here, since I don't keep track of drafts of those, so I can only note how many were written.

For the longer projects, which may or may not have chapters, I've designated five thousand words as an average chapter length (since some novels had no chapters and some have short ones) and divvied up the material accordingly. Screenplays count as three, according to the three-act structure of screenplays. Furthermore, because stories I've worked on, especially in recent years, have often been from wholly conceived cycles (that is, the pieces work together so that the material falls somewhere between a story and a novel), I've indicated these types of stories separately.



There was a drop-off in 2000. In 1999 was when I first had home-access to the Internet, and much of my time during the next few years was spent online, chatting with my new toy and trying to get dates. In part, I'd been so discouraged by lack of publication and lack of writer friends and so encouraged by online correspondence that for a while I did not make writing much of a priority. When I moved to my current home, however, that changed, because I was now back among a literary set and because I'd become discouraged in the dating arena much as I had been in the publication one.

Entertainment Spending 2011 versus 2002

I was thinking I don't go to as many concerts as I used to and that I more often am prone to just have a drink than to pursue any other form of entertainment, and the following graph of my entertainment spending this year from January to June confirms it. In fact, I haven't spent money on a single concert (though I can think of at least two free ones I've been to).

Movies appear on here quite a bit, but that's all from January and February, during which the French film series was occurring here in Athens, which skews the numbers upward accordingly. Last year, sans the series, I watched fewer than one film a month.

Dancing is here because there were some cheap lessons available that I was taking, but alas that's moved across town, and I'm not motivated enough to drive to them, so those numbers will likely drop off in the second half of this year.

Also not on here--coffee, or rather tea (since I hate coffee). It's a rarity, but still, I usually indulge in a trip to the coffee shop at least a few times in the winter.

Games includes things like bowling, pool, foozball, and so on.

This is all different from shortly after I moved here, or so I think. Let's see. Here's how the dynamics play out in 2002 from January to June.

Surprisingly I did spend less at bars in 2002, but only slightly (around 10 percent). Overall entertainment spending has decreased by 28 percent when comparing the first six months of 2002 and 2011.