Facebook Friends

I have a lot more women friends on Facebook than men. I feel a bit embarrassed by how disparate the difference, as if I'm some sort of love and leave them sort (this from a guy who's never managed to get them in the first place). I guess I'm just too nice a guy to have a gal take an interest in me as more than friends. Here's the breakdown:

Different parts of my life render different levels of Facebook friends. The church friends are probably where a large chunk of the women tally up (and I guess I did try lamely to date some share of them). Then again, so would work be largely female, since I work in a profession that is dominated by women (about 70 percent of my coworkers are women). And even my relatives--I have only one male cousin. I'm surprised by how many high school acquaintances I'm connected with versus grad school; I made no lasting undergrad friends. Local friends take up a large share; I wonder how much of that is a testament to how much I like where I live and how comfortable I am in this setting versus how much of that is simply a result of where I am/was living when Facebook came into being (that is, would I have more Texas friends if Facebook had come into being when I was living there?).

Roaches Spotted September versus October

I've lived in this apartment for ten years and have generally only had about five or so roaches a year, but I had an infestation this past summer. I'm not sure why or how, though I suspect it may have been the lack of a harsh winter. It's been a pain trying to get rid of them.

In early October I took a vacation, left the apartment for a while, left no dirty dishes in the sink. I was wondering whether the bugs would proliferate without my active presence looking to kill them or if they would die off without my constant feeding of them through cooking meals and such. It looks like it was the latter. (The x axis is the day [1st day of survey in September versus 1st day of survey in October, etc.], the y is the number of roaches.) Since October, I've only found about one per week or so, still higher than I'd like.

Emails Received versus Sent in October

Back in 1999, when I first got online at home, one thing I looked forward to was possibly meeting women to date, since I was never very good at doing this in real life. The first few months proved more frustrating than imagined--plenty of correspondents but few I was attracted to. I gave up, and then one gal showed up who became a friend for a few years, though we weren't compatible for dating. Over the course of the next year, my communication with potential dates grew, until, again, I got frustrated not so much with lack of attraction but with the lack of compatibility.

Online communication never did turn into much more than just that since then. And I've backed away from doing as much of it as I used to, while e-mail itself has been replaced by Facebook and other things that I don't use much of (I'm old school and stick to e-mail largely).

I decided to look at what kind of communication I do via personal e-mail. Interestingly, I do largely communicate mostly with women, as is evidenced by the following graph. And I send more personal e-mail than I receive.

Method of Rejecting Dates

I think it would be hard to provide an actual scorecard here of how proposed dates were turned down. Although I haven't dated much, twenty-plus years of dating is still a lot to try to recall. So instead, I'm trying to remember just the last ten years.

Below is a chart of ways girls have rejected my dating proposals. I'm including any women I asked out after a reasonable time of getting to know them as well as women who I actually managed to get a few dates with before being rejected for subsequent dates.

As the chart shows, women often don't tend to be very forthright. Rather than saying No, they tend to opt to make excuses at every invitation or, if possible, even disappear (easier with long-distance acquaintances, where I'm not likely to run into them again).

Among these, the ones I hate the most are the ones that involve a breakdown of communication: accepting a date then canceling and refusing to reschedule (particularly troublesome if substantive planning was involved), repeated excuses, and a failure to return messages. I hate the last two for two reasons: (1) I don't know what's going on for a certain length of time; and (2) I am left wondering whether I actually was rejected or simply gave up too soon. (After all, there have been women I asked out multiple times who finally accepted after a full year of discourse.)

I think as I've gotten older, I've become better at reading the signals. I tend now to understand better that no return message or repeated excuses (especially with no counter offer) almost always equal no. But that still leaves sometimes a month or two before I recognize what's going on (and even then, such excuses make it easier for me to continue hoping where there really isn't any). I'd rather be saved the hassle of asking two or three times and just be told no nicely but directly. I also dislike the lack of returned messages because sometimes it's killed what could have been a decent friendship.

I say I hate these techniques for turning down dates, and yet, I recognize how difficult it is to be that direct, since I've often used excuses or slower and less personal messages (I always return messages) as ways to distance myself from a gal who seems interested in me whom I don't fancy. Knowing how I feel about it, though, I've tried to be more direct in the past few years (as well as more direct in asking women out, so that I get clear answers). Still, it's awkward to be direct sometimes: I mean, why contact someone just to say, "Hey, I'm not into you." Seems kind of rude and strange. It's a little easier, for me, if the gal is the one contacting me--showing me lots of attention--since it gives me the opportunity to explain why she probably shouldn't be doing so.

Percentage of Bands I've Seen Live in My CD Collection

What percentage of bands contained in my CD collection have I seen live? Here's how it breaks down:

Penguin and Random House Merger

So Penguin and Random House are planning to merge, which I think is utterly insane. Why? Because my feeling is that they publish the bulk of the books in this country. There are two of what are called the "big six" (or is it five?) publishers. But in fact, they are the two biggest--or that would seem the case to me. I decided to take a look at my own bookshelf and see what percentage of the books are from these two companies. Here's how a random shelf of nonfiction books (since I work for a university press, I decided to include that as part of the percent too):

Here's how it looks for fiction:

Nearly half! Seriously, the best fiction generally is being published by these two companies; HMH and Harper both publish their share, but it's nowhere near to the amount that RH and Penguin do. I hope, but I doubt, that antitrust will keep this merger from going through.

The argument these companies will make--and it's not necessarily unjustified--is that they now, in the digital age, have to compete with media giants like Amazon and Apple, who will increasingly create their own content and/or dictate price schedules. Being bigger gives these two publishers more leverage, but what of the little guys? Will the heft of a bigger publisher translate to better/fairer deals for small presses too, or will it simply mean that one has to be big to play?

Books Ratings Each Year

It appears that some years I am a softee (e.g., 2011), and in other years I find nearly nothing absolutely stunning (this being one of those years). In all years, I end up at least liking or finding passably good most books I read, which makes sense, since I'm the one who selects them. Here are how many books received each star rating by each year (2012 isn't complete yet, though), with five being "loved," four being "liked," three being "okay," two being "didn't like," and one being "hated":

And here is how it looks as a percent:

Longest Books Read by Year

Using my handy-dandy GoodReads stats, I was able to find out the following. Each year's longest book read has fallen between 600 and 900 pages.

Distance Walked Each Week

According to Google maps, my current walk to work is 0.9 miles. My previous walk to work was 4.0 miles. I took the bus three days a week and walked home, meaning that I walked twelve miles per week. Now, I don't take the bus at all and walk all five days of the week both ways. The walk to the bus itself was a mile, so really that was five miles of walk each day I did so back at my previous office location. Never mind the explanations; here's the chart:

Looks like I'm walking significantly less per week than previously. Five to ten miles is still good for you according to something I read recently, but not as good as fifteen.

However, since I no longer walk as far, I've upped my other exercise, which usually consists of two miles of running or four miles of stationary biking four days a week (whereas previously I did this only one day per week). Add in these miles (assuming I split the biking and running evenly), and the mileage covered is actually a bit more now:

Of course, I walk at other times too, but I consider the walk to/from work as the most significant and steady.

Rejections by September 13

As I write this on September 13 (though I obviously posted it much later), I have received three rejections slips since September 1, the start of the submission season. That's out of thirty-nine separate submissions. I wanted to look at how many rejections I've received by this time in previous years.

It's a bit unfair to compare anything before 2008 since before than I submitted only by snail mail and only about seven pieces at a time (whereas now I submit about forty pieces at a time, and many of those via the Web). From 1988, when I first started submitting writing to journals (much too early, for I wasn't any good then), to 2007, I only received a single rejection by September 13 seven times in those nineteen years.

The year 2008 is when I started submitting online and from a much wider selection of my writing. Here's how many rejections I've had by this time in each year:

I must have been quite bummed at this time in 2009, but as I recall, it ended up being a banner year in terms of acceptances.

Life Timeline

Some things don't go quite as one might desire. Actually, I never had much faith that I would win a Pulitzer, but it was nice to dream. However, I'm still waiting on the first book publication (many a writer ten or fifteen years younger than me has a published book now; I don't know that I ever had an age in mind, but certainly by age thirty), and on that wife (around thirty) and kids (around thirty-five). I'm forty-two now, quite a few years past those ideal ages. At least I've had steady jobs that I've mostly enjoyed, in what would have been my dream profession and in my dream location (I wanted to work as an editor at a publisher in the West or South, then later as I refined my desires, as an editor at a university press in a small university town--and that's what I do and where I live).

People I've Been Compared With

I've been compared with seven people that I can remember: Woody Allen, Jim Carrey, Todd Solendz, Orel Hershiser, John Malkovich, the Peter McNichol character on Allie McBeal, Michael Stipe, and David Bilowus. The latter is a "church" celebrity (a chorale director), not one most people would know outside my faith. McNichol's character probably does have a similar personality, and I'm not terribly bothered by that. I think the only comparison I was ever flattered by was Malkovich--he's a kind of attractive guy.

Anyway, if we break this down by what these people actually do, what they're famous for, acting of course comes out at number 1, and it's the profession most in the public eye, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Approximate Distance Traveled for Last Five Dates

I'll go a long way for a date, especially since women of my faith are so few and far between.

Website Viewing Hits 3

So here's the viewing habits for the past month. It looks quite similar to last month, and given that it represents a wider scope of time, it's probably on a part with the usual totals. Dating personals and Web ads dropped off, it appears, in favor of business and search engines. Not sure why business showed up so high this time. I'll do another survey in a few weeks.

Books Read per Year

Apropos of last week's chart, I decided to look at how many books I read each year and what slice of them were by authors I'd never read before. Is it true I've read more in recent years? Is it true that I read more of the same authors earlier on than I do today? Let's see:

Indeed, my gut feeling appears largely to be true! The number of books has gone up--though it's descended again the last few years. And the books by authors I've never read has been the larger share in most recent years. But let's see how it works on a percentage basis each year.

Yep, this confirms, by percentage, what I had thought. The blue takes up less space overall in more recent years than it did in earlier ones.

Approximate Ages at Which I've Read Vladimer Nabokov

Having charted my Vonnegut reading last week, I figured I should do that same for another writer who I've more consciously tried to read more of over the years and with whom I've done so throughout my life (as opposed to writers like Kerouac or Fante, who I read largely in my twenties and who I'm largely confined to rereading now, if I read anything at all).

Approximate Ages at Which I've Read Kurt Vonnegut

So I recently finished up God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a novel that ranked as the favorite of an acquaintance of mine back in my early twenties. It's taken me twenty years to get to it. I don't know why. It's not that I'm not a Vonnegut fan. He wrote some good stuff. But I just haven't run out and read a lot of his fiction. As the chart below shows, I read him most in my early twenties.

There's a certain obviousness to his points and themes, but I don't know that that should make him someone a person outgrows. There's much to admire, including that voice that is very much his own--and certainly enough, I think, that it won't be ten more years before I return to him.

First and Second Date Activities

It would likely be hard to put together a list of such dates over the course of my life, since--even though I have never dated a lot--twenty years is a long time, and it's likely I've forgotten a date or two in doing this assessment. There's also the whole question of whether the activity was a date in the first place. I've tried hard, in the past couple of years, to ensure that what I'm doing is being read as a date so that I don't end up accidentally in the friend zone (unfortunately, so far, it hasn't done much good).

So here's what I did on memorable/remembered first dates:

Or to break it down another way by activities involved:

Here's what I did on memorable/remembered second dates:

Or to break it down a different way by activities involved:

It looks like dinner is the clear winner for first dates, and it is often a feature of second dates. Why does lunch play so small a role? I think it's that going to lunch, for me, is simply too rushed. Even if the idea is to keep a first date short so as not to prolong discomfort, because I rarely live close to where my dates live, lunch is hard to come by.

In fact, a number of my first dates involved things, stretching into longer hours, that most people would reserve for later dates, scared as they are that the first date will go badly. I've generally known the women somewhat by the time we go on the first date, I suppose, which may be one reason I haven't always felt compelled to keep the date short just in case, though I have on the two most recent dates I've gone on. Even when I don't know the gal that well, if I'm out on a date with her, it almost always seems to go fairly well--I'm entertaining and nonthreatening and only a little weird (and not in a creepy kind of way). After all, the date is about getting to know someone, and that for me is fun, even if it's not a match.

Another thing: dinner and a movie--looking back at that, those were mostly dates when I was far younger. I would no longer choose that as an option--I want to spend my date talking. After age twenty-one, it's easier to extend a night at a bar somewhere, which allows for more interaction than a movie would.

Pets I've Had

I tell people I have a pet lemon. Indeed, I have had a lemon for over twenty-five years. I promised I'd throw it out when it split, but it hasn't yet. It's petrified now and like a maraca, with its seeds inside.

I've never had a pet as an adult. Pets are responsibility, and they limit one's ability to travel or move. As a kid, though, we had many a family pet, when we could (depending on how severe my mom's allergies were at the time: because of her allergies, we never had a dog within my living memory).

Below at the types of pets we had and the number of years we had them:

We never did have fish or birds.

Offices versus Cubicles

So in my various jobs I've had offices, cubicles, and shared offices. I thought it might be interesting to break down how many years I've spent in each:

What's even more pronounced to me when I look at this chart? I've been in the workforce for over twenty years!

Length of Time in Offices versus Jobs

In June, I moved to a new office in a new (to me) building, though I did not move to a new job. This made me wonder how long I've spent in my various offices in general and how that compared to how long I've stayed in various jobs.

Here's how many years I've stayed in respective offices (numbers are of course greatly rounded):

When I break it down by place, it looks like I moved around the most at Harcourt and had the longest stays in my current job:

Website Viewing Hits 2

Okay, so a couple of weeks have passed since I created that first chart. Now let's look and see if things are pretty much the same as it was for the first week:

So it appears that the subjects of the Websites have changed quite a bit in the past few weeks and that, given the larger time span, the list of types of sites has diversified significantly.

Chart Poem

Years ago I wrote an imagist nonsense poem that I have never attempted to get published--mostly because it's silly; in fact, because it's no good. I mean, where is the imagery? Is it even a poem?

But I figured, hey, this blog is the perfect place for it. So here it is, a "poem" with charts:

Website Viewing Hits

So I have software that tells me where I've been and breaks it down by category. I don't know quite how the categories are established, since I'm certain I don't spend 4 percent of my time in "chat" (the last time I chatted online was probably five months ago). I suspect every ad a site serves up gets to be part of the categorizing, so I don't actually have to go to the page (e.g., if I'm in gmail, the g-chat being available, even if unused, perhaps gets categorized).

Anyway, here's how my viewing apparently breaks down for the past week:

Women I've Been Rejected By

There's no shortage of these, but the chart below focuses on women with whom I had an extended friendship/dating-type relationship. I have always had problems with closing the deal--by that I mean switching over from casual dating or friendship to something more serious, something clearly defined as a relationship, where there's a boyfriend and a girlfriend and all that that entails.

In my life, I've gotten around to the "talk" five times, and each time the result has been, "Let's stay friends, as I'm not interested in something romantic." Here's how long it took for me to get to that point with each gal:

So why does this always happen? (And I'm not being hyperbolic since I've never had a "yes" and thus never had an official girlfriend.) I think there's a combination of factors. One, I probably send off friend signals too much rather than romantic signals (especially because I really try to avoid too much physical touching: I'm more a believer in "courtship" than "dating"; that is, I don't want to do anything with a gal I wouldn't do with anyone else until a relationship is formalized--and wouldn't do most things until the wedding). Still, there are verbal signals one can send, and I really tried to do that before I got rejected this last time a few months ago, but alas whether it worked or not--I still got the same result. Another may be that my asking has often been part of a sense of panic rather than calm: another guy seems to be moving into the picture, one of us is moving away, the gal is spending less and less time with me. Hence, it's been bad timing on my part.

In some cases, part of the reason I asked, though, was so that I would know where I stood with regard to dating so that I could pursue other opportunities without guilt. So in that sense, I was trying to be honorable to the woman I'd been seeing. Sometimes, the "no" was a partial relief, sometimes not--depending on how real and immediate those other opportunities were and how interested I was in pursuing them.

I suppose one good thing for those who I ask is this: they end up married within a few years. The only one still single is the one who just rejected me. How long will she stay on the market? We'll see.

 

This other chart shows the time it took to end the possibility of a relationship with women I went out with for a period, who I never got around to asking for one reason or another: (1) I had serious intentions but the gal made clear we would only be friends before I ever got to a point where I felt certain enough about my own goals to ask; (2) the gal rejected me by disappearing because I wasn't sufficiently into her (which is true: I probably never would have asked); or (3) the gal threw herself at me (i.e., she brought up "the talk" rather than me), and I had to turn her down (in each case we remained platonic friends afterward, as we were before).

It's easy to boohoo when I get rejected, but the above chart shows that I've disappointed my share of women as well (and I'm probably not even listing all of them, since there wasn't a formal time when I had to do the rejecting in most cases).

I used to think it was easier to get rejected than to reject, but when I think on those friendships I've charted above, the hardest ones, in my memory, have been those I was rejected by. What I think I really meant, when thinking that rejecting was harder than being rejected, is on the short term: after one date or something like that, because it feels much more superficial in those cases: how can I reject this person to whom I have hardly given a chance and who by every indication is wonderful but who doesn't at all light my fire and who I suspect never will? Cases, in other words, where my heart says one thing but my head another. If the yellows in the bottom chart had actually asked rather than disappearing, perhaps my feeling would be that rejecting is harder, since two of those were clearly head versus heart cases.

Grade Point Average and Standardized Tests

A few years ago, I was reviewing my grade reports from elementary school and was surprised to find that I was not that good of a student, since by college I was getting a 4.00 consistently.

Well, today, I went back to those records and was actually surprised to see that I really wasn't as bad as I thought--and that I also wasn't that good. What kept me from the 4.00 consistently through high school was almost always physical education; in elementary, penmanship could be added to physical education as a bane to my grade level (though I got B's and C's in other classes as well, especially early on).

Neither penmanship nor physical education were things I had to worry about in college, so my grades improved accordingly, though there were a few classes I was almost certain I'd get a B in and somehow squeaked by with the A. C below equals college (I did 5.5 years, as I worked full time for most of my undergraduate years), G equals grad school.

Not surprisingly to me (as I knew this as well), my standardized test scores dropped throughout elementary, though there wasn't as much correlation between higher grades and lower standardized test scores as I thought. And apparently, in seventh, I was back to being high on those test scores (too bad that wouldn't stick through the SAT and GRE, where I did above average but nothing close to scholarship level).

Another interesting thing about those standardized tests. I did exceptionally well in the language portions of the tests early on but not as well at the math. I remember not quite understanding many math concepts when I was younger. By seventh, my scores reversed--math had become my strong suit, but language not as much. That said, where I largely faltered in language was with vocabulary, something that to this day I do not test well in, whereas I do very well with comprehension or grammar. Probably, the problem with vocabulary for me is that those tests often pose words out of context, and for me, context is key to my understanding.

Car Colors

I've only owned three vehicles, each of them in a different color. Here are the vehicle colors that have thus dominated my life:

I didn't realize I'd owned the car I have now for so long (seven years). Hard to believe how much time has passed since I purchased it.

Number of Stories Accepted, Rejected, or Ignored per Year

I've felt like this past year has been one in which I haven't seen very many acceptances of stories for publication, and a review of statistics shows why. In 2009 and 2010, I had an unusual number of acceptances, it appears. The 2011 figures aren't completely in, since I generally give it one year before declaring a submission ignored, so those 26 ignores for 2011 may come down by some number by the end of 2012. Still, the chances of me seeing again the number of story publication acceptances I had for 2010 submissions is unlikely. (By contrast, I've seen quite a bit of poetry being accepted after a couple of years of total drought.) (Note, I didn't start logging whether a publication commented on a rejection until around 2000.)

Number of Submissions before Acceptance

I recently saw a blog documenting people's number of submissions before their first acceptance of a story by a publication. One guy had submitted a piece fifty-nine times before it had been accepted somewhere (and for pay). Some people put up some rather surprising numbers in terms of percentage accepted (in the realm of about 30 percent, whereas others were more in my realm of 2 percent).

Anyway, the blog made me wonder how many rejections each published piece had to go through before being accepted. I've broken it out by short stories and poetry. Let's look at poetry first:

Interestingly, if a poem is going to be accepted, it looks like it has the best chance of happening within the first three submissions. That said, as the number of times I submit a poem goes up, so too does the likelihood that an editor will note liking the poem but not accepting it.

Now let's look at stories:

Pretty much, the same rules hold up for stories as for poems, though stories appear to be much more difficult to have accepted, at least for me.

I Write Like

Having read how little analysis went into how this guy created this program (which can be found here), I don't think it can be taken too seriously. That said, I was curious to see how my own work would fare. So who do I write like? Well, if we're talking poetry, I write the most like James Joyce, as shown in the chart below:

The assorted others (each with one poem) were Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Chuck Palahniuk, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Kurt Vonnegut. (I wasn't even aware some of the people wrote poetry!)


For stories, it's another matter. When I first found this site and pasted in single paragraphs, I kept coming up with Cory Doctorow, whose work I didn't know (but I plan to read, now that I know of him) and occasionally Dan Brown or David Foster Wallace (ironically, most often with letters).


Paste in full stories, however, and my writing most often resembles Chuck Palahniuk, especially my early published stuff. Later stuff trends more toward Cory Doctorow. Here's the breakdown:

As for this blog entry--apparently you're reading the work of H. P. Lovecraft.

Shirts by Color

My favorite color, I believe, must be blue, since it seems to be the color that dominates my wardrobe--or at least the button-down shirts in my wardrobe--as shown in the following chart:

Or perhaps a bar chart, where I can select the colors would be more expressive:

Of course, the chart could be broken down slightly differently. For "white patterned" I counted any shirt that was primarily white. Hence, a shirt with blue stripes was blue if the stripes made up 50 percent or more of the shirt, whereas if the stripes made up less than 50 percent of the shirt's color, then the shirt was counted as "white patterned." I suppose one could also conclude that white is my favorite color, but that is more a default safe choice for semiformal occasions. I try to have enough of those button-downs around to last me a week, were it ever to be necessary.

Hits on My Reading Blog

So last week, I discussed how the hits on this blog are pretty much the same after a full year of posts. My most successful blog, however, is a far different matter. As one can see in the chart below, hits pretty quickly (within four months--I didn't track the first three months) hit one hundred per month, and over the course of that first year tripled to three hundred.

The story continues. Since 2008, the number of hits on Short Story Reader has continued to grow, though the rate of growth has slowed significantly. Also, it's evident that the hits go up and down--especially during the summer--but the overall trajectory has been up, now usually topping nine hundred a month.

My Life in Charts Hits per Month

My Life in Charts is one year old. From what I can tell, though, it hasn't caught on with readers. I average about the same number of hits a year later per month as I did when I started--in fact, lately the projectory is down. In a few weeks I'll compare that to another blog of mine whose audience has grown steadily over the years it's been up, including just its first year.

State of My Underwear

In spring, I usually purge clothing, getting rid of clothes that have gotten to ragged to continue wearing. I did, this spring, for example, purge four out of twenty-eight button-down shirts. The worn-out shirts had severely frayed collars. It was a shame to see them go.

Apparently, I purged a lot more underwear last year than I realized, because I was under the impression I had more underwear needing to be purged than I thought. What is interesting, however, is the reason for the purging. It used to be mostly holes; this year, it's mostly worn elastic, as shown in the following chart:

Attempts to Get an Agent

So I have this novel I brought to a finish some time ago, and as of spring 2011, I've finally gotten around to sending it to a few literary agents. But until winter 2012, I never got beyond a form letter back. Finally, in February, an agent actually asked to see a bit more.

Really, when I think about it, I shouldn't be surprised. I have had to select people to hire at times in my life, and sometimes, you're pulling one person out of fifty--and there might be several who are qualified--and I'm sure it's like that for agents as well, only to a greater extreme.

So here it is, a pie chart showing the percentage of agents who sent me form rejections versus the percent who never even answered my query, and the lone agent who showed even some initial interest.