Approximate Weight over My Life

Unlike for some people, becoming overweight has not been a problem for me, but I do find that as I'm aging, my weight does increase, such that one day it could be a problem. During my early years, I basically gained ten pounds each year, but I hit a plateau around high school and stayed there until just after high school; after gaining ten pounds in my early adulthood, I lost it when I moved out on my own. One-twenty was way too thin, but I couldn't put weight on. Slowly, over the years, it moved back to 130 and then 135.

I hadn't weighed myself in years and had always been skinny, so when I discovered that, somehow, I'd gotten up to 150 pounds, I was shocked. I actually put myself on a diet for a while, counted calories, got down to about 140. These days, I don't really count; I just try to get enough exercise and to not eat too much sugar. My weight seems to hover around 145, which is about right for my height and body type. I do feel a bit nervous about that, though, knowing I could easily creep up beyond what I should be if I'm not careful enough. All weights below are approximate.

Distribution of Acceptances

Sometimes I begin to feel as if acceptance slips have not come to me in a long time. I was wondering, in this most recent spate of rejections, how accurate my current feeling is. It's been four months since an acceptance slip, and I've gotten over eighty rejections. In recent history, that's closing in on the higher sets in terms of the number of rejections--and give it another month or so, it'll also be up there in terms of time.

The top graph shows the space between acceptances by time (x axis) and by number of submission rejections between (y axis) from the time I first started submitting materials.

I ramped up my submissions significantly around 2008, so the following focuses on more recent years:

Interesting: acceptances do often seem to come in clumps. (Days after I created this chart in April, I received an acceptance, from probably the most prestigious publication I've ever had work accepted by. Since, then, though--two more months--back to rejections.)

Tax Refunds per Year

Most years I've ended up paying taxes (as represented by the negative numbers); this year was one of the first in a long while that I received a refund.

My Author Name on Google

I thought it might be interesting to review how many pages are connected to my author name on Google during November 2011, since I had three online publications that month. Would the possible links to my name rise accordingly?

Back in 2008, right after my first online publication in seven years, I had about four pages of links to me (in other words thirty to forty links). By 2009, it was about seven pages. In 2010, it was around fourteen pages. And it's tended to over around that number since. Note how added publications actually seemed to drop the number of pages of links sometimes:

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.

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.

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.

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.

OkCupid Contacts

So a few months ago, I was talking with a female friend of mine regarding OkCupid, a free dating site. She's not impressed by many of the guys' profiles on there, like, What are these guys thinking? Nor is she often impressed by the messages they send. I was curious about the number of messages she gets per week, mostly because I wanted to see how that stacks up with me, as a guy. Unfortunately, she didn't answer the question directly; she simply said it depended on how often she was on. (This is a true answer, though; the more one is on, the more often one comes up in searches and the more likely you look like a person who is actively using the site and thus like a person who might be dateable.)

I signed off of the site in December, when another gal contacted me and I realized that I really wanted to focus on one gal in particular who I first went out with in August. I hadn't written to many women on OkCupid in a long while anyway, since I have a very specific kind of person in mind to date and haven't really found it there--nor did I ever really expect to. If I were more keen on just going out on friendly dates with no real potential of anything more than a new friendship, as I sometimes get in the mood to do, I might be tempted to write more women. Indeed, to my chagrin and disappointment, I have returned to a period, as of last week, where that again appears to be the case and have thus returned to having a posting on OkCupid and other such sites.

I suspect that on OkCupid I probably get a 10 to 30 percent return rate on my initial messages. Such seems to have been the case in my memory. My profile has typically been rather untraditional--and it really hasn't said much about me in an explicit form. And that seemed to work, strangely enough.

My Plenty of Fish profile (which I also took down in December and refreshed this past week), by contrast, is quite sincere and generally has received no responses. I remember once, a few years ago, writing to about fifteen women on there, receiving two "no thanks" replies, and only one message that led to any kind of communication--that is, a string of messages and a planned date. In the end, the woman decided she didn't want to go out on the day of the date and then stopped communicating. (As I recall, shortly thereafter, I ended up going out with a woman from OkCupid, one who replied back of probably five or so I messaged.)

On OkCupid, I am just goofing off--I am not serious. But that is probably less threatening and more amusing; the fact that a woman doesn't know up front the kind of person I am looking for leaves more room for anyone to e-mail.

And it also has led to a few people writing to me out of the blue, rather than me as the guy taking the lead. So here's how many women messaged me to say they liked my profile or didn't like it or just wanted to say hello or whatever, by way of introduction, on OkCupid, by month for 2010 and 2011:
So basically, as a guy, I was getting, in those two years, on average about one message out of the blue every two months. I'd be curious to know how this stacks up with other guys, as well as other women.

Miles Driven per Year

The miles I've driven each year have gotten higher over the course of the past six years, when I bought my current car. There's a notable jump in 2008, and that's when the only car rental company in town stopped allowing people to rent cars and drive out of state. Before, I'd always done long trips in a rental car; now I have to put the miles on my own car. My own car is nice, so the rental cars were often, in terms of comfort, a step down. Still, I don't like that an extra two to four thousand miles now goes on my vehicle per year.

Another big jump happened at the beginning of 2011, when my church split, as I now have to drive an extra thirty miles per week (fifty instead of twenty). In fact, because I bus to work and walk home three days a week, most of my mileage in a given year is for church--and those aforesaid long trips (this year, one to Texas and one to Florida).

My Personal Website Hits

I maintain several websites and blogs. On several of them, I run Google Analytics to calibrate hit count and to see what pages are popular and how users are finding my site. Recently, I updated my personal website. That's the one that basically has links to virtually all of the other sites. It's about me, as opposed to being about charts I create or things I read. I updated in part because the look of the site had been the same since about 2008 when I created the site. Also, a couple of items in the navigation bar stopped working, and I couldn't figure out why.

Looking over the hits per month, however, I am surprised to see that my personal website has actually had a small increase in average hits per months over the years, up to about twenty (you can discount February--the one with the most hits near the end of the line in the chart--it is an anomaly caused by my own multiple viewing of the site in trying to fix it). Where are these people coming from? Apparently, some of them are finding me via my thesis, which is posted on the personal site (hidden near the top of my vita page). It's about the short stories of Jayne Anne Phillips and offers critical commentary on a few more-obscure stories that is probably not available elsewhere; I'm glad if the thesis is of use to anyone.

Anyway, here's how the hits have increased through the years:

Car Repairs by Mile and Year

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).

IM Chats by Year

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

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

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

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

Percentage of Acceptances versus Number of Pieces Submitted

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

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

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?