Pool Time

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

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

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

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

Restaurants and Bars I Frequent, 2011 versus 2002

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

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: