Fights with Girlfriend

She's the first official girlfriend I've had, me at age forty-three. I've tried before with other gals but have always been rejected before we reached the exclusivity stage. Things with this gal have been stormy, especially since exclusivity. A lot of it's my own fault, my own indecisiveness and anxiousness about the relationship, which I'm frustrated by. I really want things to work, so why do I keep sabotaging it?

Trips to Boston

I visited Boston in October on a research and work trip. It was my fourth time to the area and the first in a decade. Here are the times I've visited Boston in the past:

I love Boston. I almost moved there at one point. But I don't know that I'd actually like living there. I've always visited in the fall--never had to endure the weather. And it's superexpensive.

Timing of Dates

So after a few disappointments in November, things turned around for a bit and even, to an extent, got to be a little stressful in terms of dates because I was spending time with more than just one really great woman--and it kind of saddened me to think that I would have to eventually settle on just one, assuming one would have me for something serious.

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.)

Age Difference among Women I've Dated

I was discussing with a woman a few days ago how a certain man she knows constantly goes for women he has no chance with, hotties in their early twenties (he's in his late thirties). It made me wonder, since here I am still single and over forty, whether I have a similar pattern. I suppose it depends on what one views as an unacceptable age gap. A recent survey noted that women want a man, on average, about four years older than they are, with a good number of them accepting men up to seven years older. I can say I've mostly stuck to women within eight years of me (what I've long considered the base norm, one year above that seven years), though most women I've gone out with have been younger than me. As I've gotten older, the age spread does seem to have become more liberal, but it doesn't seem that out of whack, I don't think.

In the chart below, the difference in age is shown on the vertical axis, my own age on the horizontal axis:

The chart above is an approximation, based on memory (I haven't kept a record of each woman I've asked out, so it's likely I've forgotten a few, especially among those who I never ended up going out with). Women closer to my age rejected me just as women farther away from my age did, and women who accepted dates also varied accordingly. There doesn't seem to be an overall trend, outside of the fact that the few women I went out with or asked out in my twenties tended to be much closer to my age for obvious reasons.

Trains, Planes, Automobiles, and Buses

I recently went to Indiana via bus, the first time I've taken an interstate bus since age five, which caused me to ponder how I generally have traveled long distances. Below is the summary of how I've traveled each year, when taking trips (that I remember, sometimes estimated) over three hundred miles and trips over five hundred miles. Train and bus have not been too popular; car and plane have been used the most for between three hundred and five hundred miles, though most of that plane travel was in the early 1990s, when I had a job that involved a once-a-month trip from Southern California to Northern; on my own, I'd usually drive that distance.

Three Hundred Miles

Five Hundred Miles

Estimated Time from First Contact to Phone Number

I'm not one to pick up phone numbers from women quickly or easily. Most of my contact with women is online, since I try to date largely within my church--and that is scattered, with women few and far between. So I thought I'd think about women I was interested in whose phone contact information I've gotten and how long it took (the y-axis represents the number of weeks, the x-axis represents the particular woman):

A lot of this delay is my own (note how, in the above, sometimes women ended up giving me the phone number without me asking), but often the women themselves delayed--I asked, but phone numbers weren't in the offing, at least not at the first request. In general, I think I've taken too much time to ask (if I'm interested, I should just move to phone and meeting as soon as possible), but interestingly, even exorbitantly long times of knowing someone have not always yielded a phone number right away.

Timing of Dates

I don't go out on a lot of dates, given the fact that I prefer to date within my faith (long-distance phone calls make up for that somewhat). The following schedule shows just how rare dates are. I had a nice string this past summer, but since then I've hit a dry spell again, for which I don't know the likely end (as evidenced by the "no's" and cancellations, although the last three cancellations were with a woman who, by then, was an established "friend only," so those probably shouldn't count as dates):

Approximate Ages at Which I've Read Vladimer Nabokov

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

Approximate Ages at Which I've Read Kurt Vonnegut

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

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

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).

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.

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: