My Life in Charts

Long Distance Calls for November 2011

2012-03-03T21:30:00.001-08:00

This is likely the last long-distance chart for a while. I changed phone carriers at the end of December and now have unlimited minutes, meaning I don't get a summary of my long-distance calls and charges.

And if you like the colors in my charts, perhaps you'd like these poems of mine about colors (or rather, lack thereof) that The Legendary was kind enough to include in its latest issue.

Number of Items on My Refrigerator Shelves

2012-02-25T21:30:00.000-08:00

I go grocery shopping every two weeks.

Here are the number of items on my shelves as they stand three days after grocery shopping:
If regular consumption holds, here are the number of items on my shelves as they stand three days before grocery shopping:
The top shelf apparently stays full--just the milk typically gets depleted. The reason is that water and extras stay on that shelf; by extras, I mean that those items move to other places as I run out of those items in the other places

Interstates I've Driven and Ridden

2012-02-18T21:30:00.000-08:00

I have lived most of my adult life in the South. Hence, most of my Interstate driving has been in the South, as this map shows, the West Coast driving being mostly my moves back and forth and back from California. The yellow are the Interstates, the purple those I've driven.

However, if we include driving from when I was a kid, and my parents took me with them on various trips, my West Coast Interstate experience increases exponentially. Most of the Interstates I knew, in fact, back then were western. The few Northeast Interstates I've ridden on are from trips I've taken as an adult, which generally involve flying to an area to visit with others who then drove me to other places. The yellow are the Interstates, the purple are those I've driven, the red those I've ridden.

Long Distance Calls for October 2011

2012-02-11T21:30:00.000-08:00

More Cell Phone Usage 2011 and All Time

2012-02-04T21:30:00.000-08:00

I thought it might be interesting to look at who I talk to on the cell phone, since I've several times looked at who gets called long distance. Here's the chart for 2011 as of the end of October:
Here's the chart for all time as of the end of October:
If I were to add in November, the numbers would skew even more in favor of the present configuration. Since then, however, I've used my cell phone hardly at all.

Cell Phone Usage 2011 and All Time

2012-01-28T21:30:00.000-08:00

Since I first got it in 2008, I haven't often used my cell phone--it's mostly for travel and emergencies and the rare case where I am needing two phone lines at once. Hence, because the cell phone is usually off, most of my calls are outgoing rather than incoming. Here's the breakdown for 2011 through the first half of October:
Here's the breakdown for all time:
Clearly I did a lot more calling out in 2011 than in previous years.

Car Repairs by Mile and Year

2012-01-21T21:30:00.000-08:00

The month of September was a frustrating one with regard to my car--I found myself in the shop three times for three unrelated things. I hadn't had to make many major repairs on it since purchasing it back near the end of 2005. Or at least, that's how it seemed. So I decided to go back and check my records. Here is a chart showing how many major repairs (anything that isn't routine maintenance like tire rotations, oil changes, or new air filters) I've had to make since I purchased the car:
I suppose that 2008 through 2010 in part have spoiled me, with so few necessary fixes.

I'm just now getting to 100,000 miles. Perhaps, that has something to do with the sudden uptick in problems, though my model is one that typically lasts well beyond the 100,000 mark in others' experience. Here's the mileage at which I had to make major repairs since 2005:

It looks like I was doing really well for about 20,000 miles, but there's been a noticeable uptick in repairs in the last 10,000. It was a very trying September through November this year (ironically, the last mechanic who worked on my car said I'd done a really good job of maintaining it--well, yes, indeed, I have, but that doesn't seemed to have helped this past year).

Long Distance Calls for September 2011

2012-01-14T21:30:00.000-08:00

Types and Subjects of Charts on My Blog in 2011

2012-01-07T21:30:00.000-08:00

Given that the year drew to a close last weekend, I thought it would be a good idea to review just what has been charted in the past year. What exactly are my obsessions and in which way do I prefer to express them? Apparently, my favorite expression of them is in the form of a pie chart, as evident in the chart below.
As for subjects (some entries probably could have fit into two or three spots, but I forced them into one for the sake of this chart below), the selection is much more balanced, though places took the lead.

Movies by Theater

2011-12-31T21:30:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-24T21:30:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-17T21:30:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-10T21:30:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-03T21:30:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-26T21:30:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-19T21:30:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-12T21:30:00.000-08:00

My Music Collection

2011-11-05T21:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-29T21:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-22T21:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-08T21:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-01T21:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-24T21:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-17T21:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-10T21:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-03T21:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-27T21:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Book Purchases by Store

2011-08-20T21:30:00.000-07:00

So come September, Borders is no longer. It's the victim of changes to the book-buying industry, which has gone progressively digital (as well as the victim, apparently, of too aggressive of an expansion earlier in the 2000s). It's one of the two brick-and-mortar new bookstores where I live; soon, only Barnes & Noble will be left, unless one counts the college bookstore. (This just in, however: a new indie is due to open soon.)

This got me to thinking regarding my own collection of books and where I've done my purchasing. I was going to guess that most of my books came from used bookstore outlets (the result, in part, of a four-year stint without access to a library), with Amazon another large contender. The statistics, however, surprised me.

I didn't survey my whole collection, as it would have taken too much time. But I selected two shelves of general nonfiction and two shelves of fiction and wrote out where each book came from. Here are the results:

Nonfiction B-G

Nonfiction H-W

Fiction D-G

Fiction G-K

So what did I learn? That most of my books I actually purchased new--they weren't remainders, weren't used, weren't freebies from work, and weren't gifts. I also learned that most of the new books I own came from bookstores, not from Amazon.

But then I began to suspect that the statistics might be somewhat skewed. After all, Amazon has only been a real viable entity for a decade. Maybe most of my books predate Amazon. And maybe, I thought, most of my new books, were purchased during the five-plus years I worked for an independent bookstore. So I decided to break the new books down by place of purchase to see, and here are the results for nonfiction and fiction:

NonfictionFiction

Indeed, after reviewing the list of stores I purchased books at, I have confirmed that most of the fiction was picked up while I was an employee at Hunter's books, which also coincided with my days in college. The college bookstore served as the source for most nonfiction, Hunter's as the source for most fiction. Other stores, including Borders, make up only a small slice of my purchasing. As we go forward, Amazon will likely pick up more of my personal library's share.

But that also caused me to reflect on the nature of bookstores themselves and what I like. I used to prefer the superstores, or a large indie. This was because they had the largest selection, and twenty years ago, that is what a good bookstore in my view could do--give me any Kerouac, Nabokov, Scott Bradfield, etc., book I wanted. But I worked in a bookstore, and I wanted to be able to purchase these things.

Now, with Amazon, a large selection no longer seems so important. I go in stores now and feel lost if they're really large. First, despite their size, they rarely stock the (full) work of some of the authors I care for. Second, as someone who no longer knows the week's best-sellers and the books that got the best reviews in the New York Times, I'm lost because there are just so many new books to choose from, and a lot of them things I'd care not one whit about. But with regard to the first, I can always order the book from Amazon if I want it that badly. And with regard to the second, I don't need a large bookstore anymore in which to browse. I find, rather, that I prefer a smaller store with a limited selection that matches my own taste. If I go in, and the store stocks mostly John Grisham novels and the like, I know it's not my sort of place; however, if I go in, and there are a couple of really good books I've heard about in recent years prominently displayed, I have a feeling I can trust the book buyer's taste, and suddenly, I'm back to the old days where bookstores excited, because I know that each book in there is a possible great discovery.

Pool Time

2011-08-13T21:30:00.000-07:00

It's the middle of summer and the days are hot. In fact, summer seemed to have come this year, early in May, a month early (early, early, early). At one time, my apartment complex had a pool, but no longer. About seven years ago or so, it was filled in, apparently "unable to be updated to meet state regulations." I rarely used it anyway. I don't particularly find sitting in a pool fun. I wonder what to do, and I am self-conscious about the lack of dress. Still, in the middle of summer days like these, I find myself wishing I had access to the pool again. So I decided to take a survey of pools within close walking distance of me. There are only two that I know of, in hotels. Those two pools are outside and can be seen from the Google maps satellite image. But there are also a number of other hotels in the near distance and one time share, all of which I suspect have pools, even if those are indoors. So here it, the pools I know are there in blue, the pools I suspect are there in light with questions marks. Unless I want to rent a room, however, I'm out of luck about usage.

Google Search Finds

2011-08-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

Around June 21, I did a search for my writing name in quote marks to see what would show up and how often. (A search for my everyday name without quotes would be interesting to chart as well, though I'd have to limit the data to the first ten pages or so, since the names are so common as to give an huge number of returns. Something tells me the first folks on there would be Jon Davies the weatherman and Jon Davies the anthropologist. I think I show up somewhere down between number 10 and 30 on some social network, which rather surprises me, since there's not much reason to include me there.)

Anyway, here's how the breakdown appears:
Or to put it in another way (as a percentage):
My name is most connected to a story that appeared in Stymie magazine. I find that interesting because it's not an easy story to get to, but Stymie, a literary magazine on sports, apparently is well connected to various sporting sites, and so my name is now connected to sites wherein you can buy basketballs and jock straps, which is certainly what I think of when I think of me.

What I find most interesting is how some journals really do a great job of getting their name out in search results. Bull, for instance, which published "The Heart Is a Strong Instrument," tweets new stories, blogs about them, Facebooks them, and so on, so that the story isn't just being hit up at its site but at all these companion sites. "The Next Superstar," which appeared in Battered Suitcase, is also listed a lot because the folks at the Suitcase cross-publish the magazine not just in html on their site but in various e-book platforms like Smashwords and as a print-on-demand journal.

I don't tweet, and I don't really use Facebook effectively, so my own site lingers somewhat down in the pile comparatively (though it comes up on the first page, probably because so many of my author bios point to my main site). My reading blog, Short Story Reader, however, has gotten attention in numerous places and so shows up pretty high up on the number of links Google finds. There again, it's more the work of others drawing attention to it than my own work of tweeting or Facebooking about it.

Anyway, if I were to ever start an online literary journal, I think the charts above might be a useful tool with regard to how to publicize the material in the journal--namely, make it available in lots of platforms.

Good Reads Charts

2011-07-30T21:30:00.000-07:00

I just discovered this fascinating tool on Good Reads. It tells me how many books I read (at least those that I acknowledged I read on GoodReads) by year, something I already know via other means. But it also tells me how many pages, which I wouldn't otherwise know. And it provides a scattershot graph of the years in which the works I read were originally published, which is really cool. So here are the number pages for 2009 and 2010, the sole lists that are complete:

And here's a snapshot of Good Reads wonderful scattershot diagram:

As expected, lots of stuff from around 2000, just before or after. But there's also a good deal of material from the mid-1900s and from the 1800s. The latter is the case because my reading list last years was in American naturalism. The year before, I did a reading list in legend and fantasy, which I guess a good deal of must have been from the mid-twentieth century. That's all I can figure.

My Reading by Genre

2011-07-23T21:30:00.000-07:00

Last week, I finished reading my friend Al's novel The Real Pleasure in Life (more info about the book available here). Right now, it's still looking for a publisher, but if others find it as enjoyable to read as I did, that shouldn't be a problem. Many of the characters in the novel are based on people I know. This made me feel a bit awkward in terms of how to think about it, but this weekend, I was reflecting on how it's not that easy to describe even people you know. In that sense, therefore, Al's really created a huge set of wonderful and fun characters--characters I think others will enjoy getting to know, even though they don't know the real-life people that serve as their basis.

I've been completing quite a few books these past two weeks. I feel like I'm reading very quickly because I'm reading fiction, most of which is shorter in length and all of which is easier to read than much of the nonfiction I'd been reading the past several months.

The recent heavy completion of books caused me to ponder what I've been reading over the last several years. This year, I hadn't read, if I'm remembering right, any fiction at all until this month. That's unusual for me, but not necessarily that unusual. Check out the numbers by genre:
A coworker of mine asked why I bother reading nonfiction. Her impression was that that was mostly what I read, and she figured I must get tired of reading such things since my job entails working with a lot of nonfiction. But of course, she has only seen me with nonfiction books in hand (since that's been the bulk of my list of late). I have often said that about one-third of what I read is nonfiction, one-third short story collections, and one-third novels.

The above chart demonstrates by year the ways in which those numbers have fluctuated over the years.

I'm surprised by how I many books I managed to read in the mid-2000s. For whatever reason, those numbers have come down in the last few years, more in keeping with the numbers I was doing in the late 1990s. Or have they? Check out the nonfiction line in comparison to the fiction. Save for 1996 (a year of heavier research in grad school), my nonfiction reading was sparse until about 2002, when a noticeable uptick began. In fact, although fiction books still outnumber nonfiction, if I split fiction out into collections and novels (which duke it out with each other each year), the two separately rarely outnumber nonfiction anymore.

The "other" category is also surprising to me. I would have figured on quite a few in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I didn't have a DVD player and thus tended to read screenplays in lieu of renting movies. But I was surprised to see the numbers stick around even at the levels they've been at. Other here includes plays, screenplays, poetry, and mixed-genre anthologies.

So that's a plot of my reading habits over the years. I wonder how others reading habits compare. Have yours changed over time as well?

Long Distance Calls for May and June

2011-07-16T21:30:00.000-07:00

Restaurants and Bars I Frequent, 2011 versus 2002

2011-07-09T21:30:00.000-07:00

I was wrapping up a freelance project last weekend when my friend Andy called to invite me out to dinner. We went by Thai Yum-Yum, which I think is just fine but which most folks in town seem to not care for in comparison to Thai-Spoon and Siri Thai. My favorite is the latter. Admittedly, I suppose Thai Spoon is better than Yum-Yum, but it's food often has a fishy taste I don't care for. Then again, I'm not really a fan of Thai food anyway.

Afterward, we went for some shaved ice at Suno. I had been once before and already knew what the product was like, so I opted just to have straight ice cream, green tea ice cream, which I hadn't had in a long while. Andy gave me stress about not living a tip in any place, but I had no change for tips and Andy did--and left the tip accordingly. I paid for the dessert, so I think I made up for his covering the tips.

Anyway, the outing was for me what I felt to be an uncharacteristic expense. I don't eat out that much, or at least that's what I think. I decided to do some investigating. In fact, I do average one meal out per month. Here's the breakdown on where I've eaten, in the Athens and Atlanta area (as opposed to when traveling), in the past year:
I visited most restaurants I went to only a single time this year, and I didn't even visit my favorite (A Taste of Indian--for that is my favorite food). By contrast to how infrequently I eat out, I'll go out for the comparably cheap single drink quite frequently. Here's where I've drank in the past year:

I go to one bar, the Flicker, most frequently obviously; Beef's is there mostly because it's close to work and it's the place my coworkers go for happy hour. Now let's compare the number of times I ate a meal out to the number of times I went out for dessert or for drinks:

So meals out average to about once a month. This, I thought, was probably less than it was ten years ago when I moved here, so I decided to go back to review the records. I was surprised to see what I found. Here's the breakdown on restaurants I ate at in 2002:
Even here, however, how my eating out is shaped by others is evident. Bombay Cafe, at the time the Indian restaurant in town, makes up only a small sliver (one single outing). Clocked and the Grit were the most likely eateries in 2002, since that is where my friends went. Here's the breakdown on bars:
Here's how many times I ate out versus went out for drinks:

There was a tiny bit more drinking, but not too much. By contrast, I was averaging eating out almost three times a month. (There were no outings just for dessert; the change there is likely influenced by one friend having given up drinking in favor of ice cream and other sugary things.) That sure seems like a lot of going out now. Indeed, if I feel like I don't go out as much, this confirms it.

June Answering Machine Messages

2011-07-02T21:30:00.000-07:00

Years ago, for a short while, I kept a list of people who called me and then broke it down by categories to examine the nature of the communication that went on in my life. I got a couple of coworkers to do it with me, and we were able to compare notes at the end of the month. Interestingly, most of us received calls primarily from a very small set of people (e.g., most calls came from one's boyfriend, etc.).

Then a few years later, I decided to conduct a similar experiment for a full year. Unfortunately, the results of that experiment were lost in a computer crash a year or so later. My experiment eventually came to an end when my friend Al decided to rig the results by called to leave a message every day. By the end of the year, not only was he the number 1 caller, but it was unlikely anyone would ever call me that many times again (indeed, now that I don't keep such a log, he doesn't call as often). As a humorous sidenote on December 31 that year, at a party, each person there called me and left a message, and of course Al called me from the party probably over twenty times. I think I had over thirty messages when I got home. They may be on a recording around here somewhere.

I didn't start a log this month. But I figured I wouldn't erase my answering machine messages, which in turn would allow me to easily document the results at the end of the month without the need for pen and paper. And now the results are in.

Interestingly, friends made up the bulk of the calls. I say interesting because years ago telemarketers likely would have been on an equal par with them. And sometimes I still feel that way. But the do-not-call list has probably doomed most such marketers and so they've given up, even among those of us who never signed up. (For a few years, I received even more robo calls than I ever had before--the result, probably, of a dwindling list of people not on the do-not-call list, which by now is likely so small it's simply not worth dialing the list.)

So here goes, the list by category:

Note: no messages from relatives. These days, I tend to do most of the calling to my parents rather than the other way around. The one business call was from an editor (!); boy, that makes me feel like a real writer. The friends consisted of three people, one of whom made up two-thirds of the calls. Among the telemarketers, I got the same calls twice over, so there were only three messages left at five different times: one was for a dental insurance, two for life insurance, and two for a credit card.

But I'm also intrigued by when these phone calls occur, and so I figured I'd plot them out:

Finally, there's this nifty scatter plot that details the times messages are most likely to arrive:

Places I've Lived

2011-06-27T21:30:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I went to a housewarming party for a coworker of mine. She moved actually right down the street from her previous address. The house features two bedrooms and a study (I suppose it could also serve as a very small third bedroom). This got me to thinking about the places I've lived, which since the age of four (that is, since the age that I can remember) have been just five places in four states, three one-bedroom apartments, one two-bedroom apartment, and one house. Put it on a bar chart, and where I've lived looks like this:

Or orient it another way, and the chart looks like this:

Either way, it's interesting to see that I've now lived longer in an apartment than in a house. And soon, I'll have lived more of my life outside of California, my birthplace, than in it, though California still trumps all other states in terms of individual time spent.

Places Paint Is Wearing off My Car

2011-06-18T21:30:00.000-07:00

The gray represents the places where the paint has worn to the second level--that is, the lacquer or whatever it is has pealed off, leaving the bare burgundy beneath. On the roof, what is still lacquered is so worn out, though, that it doesn't shine in the sun, not even after a washing--hence, those parts where the paint has worn off, right after a washing, actually look more shiny. A couple of tiny spots on the doors have gone to the gray base beneath.

I plan on keeping the car a while longer, so I'm weighing whether a paint job may actually be worth it, since the mileage isn't so high. I'm not even sure how much a paint job costs, but I figure it's ridiculously expensive. I saw some paint/body work done on a car when I was a teen, and it seemed like an incredible amount of work, such that I wasn't capable of it myself.

I notice a lot of other cars with a kind of paint fading that has taken place now. I guess it's to be expected in the South among older cars, especially when you have no garage and park outside day after day after day.

My Local Spending: An Updated Account for May

2011-06-12T21:30:00.000-07:00

So I decided to give May a full slate of local financial statistics, as I did March and April. Sure, it was an uncharacteristic month in that I spent quite a bit on one-time purchases that were out of the ordinary for me. But one-time purchases do happen, and in any given year, it's thus likely that I might visit a store just the one time. So here is the graph for May:

And here is the map, with sizing of places based on how much I spent at each place:

Golden Pantry and Kroger still manage to eat up a huge chunk of my expenses, but with the bigger purchases at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and the Shoe Department, things actually look a bit more spread out. What's interesting, however, is what happens when I plot this on a three-month pie chart:

Here, Kroger and Golden Pantry return to prominence. It would likely take some huge expense, like a major car repair, to displace them from the position in which they fall over the long haul. As a result, the map below may in fact be a fairly accurate, though somewhat random, reflection of typical spending.

June would feature some new places, like Sumo, a dessert shop on Broad that I tried out with a friend Monday night. Interesting place--the dessert is made from shavings of ice milk or something like that. Supposedly, it is low in calories, though with all the added syrup and toppings and such, I'm not sure it how low in calories it stays. The folks running the place were kind enough to open up just for us, just as they were closing. I've got to think it's pretty tough for small business owners who ply a trade at something like desserts as opposed to groceries (or even electronics), but then, I guess their profit margins are higher to make up for it.

Parts of Speech, First Words, and the Books I Like

2011-06-04T21:30:00.000-07:00

I received a copy of the fall 2010 edition of Southern Indiana Review Thursday. I'd been waiting for the spring issue to show up, thinking that was the one I was in. But apparently, I was in the fall issue--I simply hadn't been sent my contributor copy. So interested readers can check out purchasing a copy here. My contribution, a story, is called "Such Great Misery of Late."

I'd planned to blog on May expenses this week, but because this publication arrived, I figured I'd blog on something language oriented instead. Last week sometime, I was giving thought to how stories start--that is, what their first sentences, or even first words, are. I was wondering if there were any patterns among books that I like. So I did a survey. Each year, I pick out three books I read that year as my favorites, one nonfiction work, one collection of stories, and one novel. My list goes back about fifteen years. Those books become part of my personal library at home. Are there patterns among these favorite books? Do they differ between fiction and nonfiction? Here's what I found . . .

Of the forty-five books surveyed, "The" led six times, for the lead. Next up, at three each, were "It," "I," and "When." "My" and "This" both came in at two. Really, though, these word selections seemed to incidental to do much with--too many ones. So I figured I'd look at the words in another way--by parts of speech. The breakdown goes as follows:

Nonfiction works on my favorites list lead with the given parts of speech in the following distribution:

Fiction broke down somewhat similarly, though with a bit more variety:

So the total breaks down like this:

Note that verbs never lead as the first word in the book in any of my favorite texts, though two gerunds did show up (one in nonfiction, one in fiction). Pronouns (which are split between possessive adjectives and nouns in the charts above) were popular, forging 42 percent of the first words (with relative pronouns making up 21 percent of those, or 9 percent overall). Articles accounted for 16 percent, and proper nouns 13 percent.

I suppose for some of these works we could get into an argument over what the first word of the book is. Sometimes, there's a preface. Should I count that? An epigraph? A chapter title? I counted none of these. Basically, I went with the first word of the text proper.

Then I got curious as to how my own writing would stack up. So here's a chart with a breakdown of the parts of speech in my thirteen published stories. Among those stories, two each start with "The," "At," and "That." Parts of speech run as follows:

On my list, pronouns forge 38 percent of the first words, which isn't far from the percent among my favorite books. Articles accounted for 15 percent, again close, and proper nouns for 15 percent as well. I guess the one pattern I do see is that while my work mimics the percentages on the overall list, it mimics the fiction even more closely than it does the nonfiction, which tends to start with prepositions less frequently.

So what does all this indicate? I'm not sure. It could mean that my own writing generally mimics those works that I like; it could mean that works I like tend to conform to my own writing. Or it could just mean that among the English language in general, the parts of speech that lead off a sentence fall into a pattern close to what I've outlined in my favorite works and in my own work. I suspect it's probably the latter. But the only way to find out would be to do a much more exhaustive survey of works published in English. Anyone interested in taking up that survey? I know I'd be interested in reading it, but if you think I'm too lazy to conduct the survey myself, you're right. In fact, I just realized that I have fourteen published stories--that other story starts with a preposition. Alas, I'm not going back to redo the chart.

Al Is back in Town

2011-05-28T21:30:00.000-07:00

My friend Al is moving back to town this weekend. This means that I'll be seeing him on regular occasions again. He's been gone about four years, off at two different graduate schools in two different states. Somehow, we've managed to keep in touch. It helps that his love of Athens has never subsided and his parents live nearby. Hence, he's been back with some regularity.

Al is a mysterious guy to me--he never seems short of friends or of new acquaintances. I, on the other hand, feel perennially short of them; I find making new friends or feeling comfortable around new people--or even many "old" people--difficult. But Al puts a person at ease.

That I still know Al, after having met him over fifteen years ago, seems in some ways amazing. We went to graduate school together. We were in a writing group together, and on a few occasions did social things together. But I wouldn't have thought of him at the time as my closest pal at grad school. After he moved on, we exchanged letters and more rarely phone calls (this, before the days when e-mail was common, so we're talking real letters). In other words, we stayed in touch. I only stayed in touch with three other grad students, one of whom has since dropped out of my life and two of whom (i.e., a couple) have kept up a very irregular though wonderful acquaintance. With Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like, a lot of other friends from those days have since gotten back in touch, which is great too.

But Al has become something more than a grad school buddy. He's become one of my closest friends.

Recently, Al completed a novel. I haven't read it--not that I don't want to (but I haven't been given a copy). Others have, though, and I've been told I am in it, neuroses and all. One of those neuroses is what inspired me to start doing this blog--my desire to document things in a statistical format. And so, it seems fitting, since Al is moving back to town, to document what interactions I've managed to have with Al since he left. That information, however, would have been very difficult to put together, so I've settled for this much more narrow graphic--the interaction I've had with Al in the past year. So here it is, a map of places I've hung out with Al since last May.

My Local Spending

2011-05-22T18:08:00.000-07:00

Much has been said about the difference between core inflation and inflation, but if my own spending habits over the course of the past two and a half months is indication, "core" inflation doesn't mean much to most of us. As one can see in the following charts, groceries (Kroger) and gas (Golden Pantry) represent most of the local spending I do from month to month (that is, what I buy locally rather than sending a check in to some distant office).

March

April

May

But what I was mostly intrigued about with regard to my personal spending was, if one were to make a map, based on these spending amounts, what the largest businesses would be versus the smallest. In other words, determining major landmarks of the town by my spending, what would they be and how large would they be? I was thinking, Flicker, a bar I frequent, would be fairly large. But in fact, despite the amount of time I spend there, the amount of dollar spending I actually do there is relatively small. Compare that to, say, Kroger, where I might spend one hour every two weeks and the amount of money I spend there. (The actual relative size of Kroger to Flicker on the map might be close to right.) Or even more so, check out Golden Pantry, a gas station. That place is tiny, but according to what I spend, it would be in relative size comparable to Kroger. Match this to how much time I spend there, which is maybe fifteen minutes a month, and one sees that these folks are really making money from their patrons (save that, the profit margin on gas is extremely low, as compared to alcohol).

The map, however, only includes the first twenty days of May. Last night, I splurged and bought a few clothing items I needed to replace and a cheap digital camera (since my old camera was kaput). If I added those in, J. C. Penney's and Wal-Mart would shoot to a higher end of spending this month and fit prominently on the map. However, in terms of repeat purchases and visits, as the charts above show, these two would likely only show up every few months. Flicker, Kroger, Golden Pantry, and the U.S. Post Office at least have consistency going for them, even if the first and last here have a relatively small portion of the dollar amount each month.

Acceptance, Rejection, and Time of Publication

2011-05-19T19:03:00.000-07:00

I have a blog about my reading. I have a Web site about me--mostly my work--that is infrequently updated, infrequently visited, and not very personal. Perhaps, some people might be intrigued to read personal observations and things like that. After all, I sometimes visit random people's blogs for exactly that purpose, and some folks are interesting. So this blog is about me, the personal me. Sort of. (I don't expect it to be too regular, since I'm waylaid with other projects pretty much all the time.)

I love statistics. I've been known to keep track of myself this way. So I figured that occasionally, I'd share statistical insights with others.

Today, having received this week a copy of the latest Concho River Review, which features a story of mine, I decided to ruminate on publication data. (You can purchase a copy on CRR's Web site here; it features the work of a lot of folks more established than I am and includes some fantastic poetry, my favorite being one called "Numbers" by Mary Soon Lee.) I've been waiting on this magazine and one other to appear for a while and have become somewhat anxious about them, because I need a certain number of print publications to be able to enter a contest next month. Could it be that online publication has spoiled me with its immediacy?

So I look at the facts. Here is how long it has taken for publications of mine to appear after acceptance in the last three years.

As you can see, most publications occur within one month. However, there are a few that took many months. Only three of the publications are print journals, and of those, two of them are in the more than twelve months category, with one of them being in the three to four months category. Print publication obviously takes a bit longer.

Does the same hold up for time that one submits a piece to time it is accepted? Let's see:

Here one can see that, contrary to my expectations (and those of some writer friends), the longer a journal has a story does not equate with the more likely it is to be accepted. Generally, if the story is going to be accepted, it's going to happen sooner rather than later. The print journals here fall anywhere in the three to six months camp. Curiously, the more than twelve months acceptance: it was thirteen months, by an online journal. Usually, I assume the piece was lost or rejected after twelve months, so that acceptance was a welcome surprise.

Looking at this, I guess all those publications that have been holding on to something of mine for six months, I should expect rejection from, since that would seem to be more the norm. Or would it? What I'd really need is a chart showing the percentage breakdown of time spent versus rejection/acceptance, but I'll save that for another day.