La-la-la-la!!!!!

Thoughts about this and that...

When you are required to do a group project/presentation for Program Evaluation, be sure to choose at least two people that are a) over-achievers and b) in the Industrial-Organizational track. They live and breathe for this shit.

The red chili-pepper spread from Costco shall henceforth be spread on all the food in the land, and we shall grow fat and prosper. It is also quite delicious on a bit of goat-cheese on a cracker.

Therapy is worth its weight in gold. Today I was especially gratified that my therapist showed up to our 9am meeting with wet hair. Talk about normalizing your experience.

It better snow. That's all I'm sayin'.

Left to my own devices, I will apparently stay up until 2:00am reading terrible books. Slightly related: the real advantage of a Kindle is that no one can tell you're reading Stieg Larsson.

That is all.

No News....

They say that no news is good news when it comes to internship replies. Well then I guess I'm bustin' out all over with the good news, 'cause I ain't heard nuttin. Meh, no news is just no news. A lot of my classmates are starting to brim over with interviews and rejections. The ax, she doth swing mightily.

Meanwhile, I'll just practice tolerating ambiguity. Not exactly what I would choose for my talent competition.

At the end of each semester I find myself muttering, well that was a ridiculous semester. This has probably been the least worthwhile in terms of actual accomplishment. I have a "professional roles" class which should be subtitled "Pointless busywork to distract you from Intern Applications" and the Program Evaluation class, which had been somewhat disorganized and painful and then, wham! Professor drops out due to a rumored brain tumor. Let's just say that I'm not going to be talking up my program evaluation skills on the old CV.

The real challenge truly remains my practicum work. I get the uncomfortable feelings at times that my patients truly expect me to help them. I have one patient, ONE, who actually followed my treatment plan and has eliminated his headaches and depression. I'm just as floored as you are. But seriously, I'm in the penultimate year of my training and I'm not feeling any more skilled or adept at this than when I began. But I put on a good show.

In other news, it is evident I have zero skills at outdoor holiday decorations. I have one sad little string of lights in the lilac trees, two inadvertent Stars of David blinking in my window like the all-night Manachewitz store in Haifa, and four tacky little snowflakes blinking crazily admidst the dead calla lilies. I tell this to eboy and he sighs. Heavily. Fine, I'll do it on Saturday. Let the Jew decorate the house for Christmas.

Since he's feeling unappreciated, maybe he can build himself a cross on the front lawn and climb up and nail himself to it. But I'll wait until all my christmas lights are hung before I make that smart remark. I want Clark Griswold's house. Is it too much to ask? Dammit, I demand whimsy, peace on earth, chestnuts roasting, and reindeer pausing.

Okay, time to go finish the most embarrassing, lame, incomplete, incoherent, and disjointed presentation ever. Can't wait to present it at school!

Oh yes....

Explaining the name.....

You know how I say...

You know how I always say I'm going to start blogging again? And yet I get busy or paranoid, and it falls by the wayside. However - I have determined that blogging actually serves a very useful premise: distraction.

Never again have to complete a task on time or spend time learning a new skill!

Share potentially offensive thoughts and beliefs out there for everyone to find!

Let family members know what you actually think of them!

All for the low low price of not having to work on your opiate prescription policy program evaluation presentation.

Seriously, I realize that this is stuff that only the few stalkers I currently possess actually give a rat's crap about. I suffer from no illusions of Deep Thoughts or Important Viewpoints. But I will engage as a highly evolved method of procrastination for the digital age, especially if that digital age is 2005 (blogging is so last decade).

Fuck it. It's on.

This endless quest....

Found myself feeling bad about myself again today. Not because I was skinning baby ducks alive or anything, but simply because in a little home video taken on my phone this morning, I looked so stunningly bad I opted NOT TO SEND THE VIDEO of my daughter who has been sick, to her father. Because I looked bad. Double chin.

How lame is that?

But how lame is having a double chin?

See how I go back n'forth?

I just don't get it. I used to *like* exercise. I used to love going to the gym. I used to have energy. And I know that energy begets energy. The more active you are, the more enjoyable, the easier, and the funner it all gets.

I know this intellectually.

Still, try to get my fat ass off the couch when it's cold outside. Mama HATES being cold.

At any rate, despite all the negativity and total lack of self-efficacy, I decided to suck it up and go for a walk. After all, it was sunny outside for the first time in months. I had some spare time since Dear Husband was home to watch Dear Sick Puking Daughter. And I was feeling so lazy, it wasn't like I was getting any work done on my dissertation anyway.

So, I jog/walked to the gym. Lifted weights for 30 or so minutes. Jog/walked home.

FUCK. It felt fucking awesome. Why can't I remember that? And now I'm at the library working on my dissertation. Like a normal person does.

So that makes a total of TWICE this week I have made a half-hearted Mr-Burns-Type throw at getting a little bit fitter.

New find: Downloaded the couch-to-5K podcast from Itunes. Some guy playing nondescript easy-to-run-to techno music, and he tells you when to walk and when to jog. It's actually kind of awesome and makes it go really fast and I don't have to keep looking at my watch. If I stick with it, I'll post how it's going.

Best song for weight-lifting: Here to Stay by Korn. I feel like such a badass.

All right. I want to be the kind of mother that doesn't hesitate to show videos of her daughter, even though she looks bad. But first, I want to get rid of this extra chin.

And here we are...

It's Sunday again, and I am back to this: statistical multiple regression. As in:

1. Using Model 4 state the regression equation including the constant (to three decimal places), the unstandardized regression coefficients (to three decimal places), and the predictors.\

And my brain is back to not working. Now eventually, either through desperation or panic, I was able to get my brain to complete last week's homework. So, I'm hoping that this will happen again. I even managed to get a good portion of this week's homework done last week directly after class - when all this stuff still made sense in my head. I need to do that every week, because coming back to it seven days later is no good at all.

My friend Lynae is in Bora Bora or someplace blue-skied, warm, and tropical looking and she is rudely posting photos of it on Facebook. This makes me want to defriend her, but instead I'm supposed to be happy for her because she a) is a very good friend, b) is always very supportive of me, and c) totally deserves a warm, tropical vacation. Sigh. Still, my finger itches over the defriend button because I'm a) immature, b) pouty and grumpy, and c) cold.

The baby is screaming about the nap policy, toys are littered around the home, my kitchen floor is covered in cheerio dust, and I haven't showered in three days. That's it. Time to clean up, shower, do a yoga dvd, and finish my homework. Enough wallowing! This is what I need:

Serious stats hell.

I am currently taking advanced multivariate statistics in school. It sounds fancier than it really is. But, man, do I get bogged down in it fast - god forbid I get momentarily distracted in class, because then the professor is OFF, and I'll never catch up with him. Last semester, taking graduate-level stats (for the third time in 6 years), I felt like I was really starting to understand it in a way that if you came back to me three months (or years) later, I might still be able to rattle off the steps to a simple linear regression equation. By hand, bitches.

Now we have moved on to multivariate. Moving on from ANOVA to MANOVA ain't that big a deal, seriously. And MANCOVAs bothered me not at all. However: multiple regression. Stepwise, hierarchical, forward, mahalanobis distance....gah, I'm stuck back in the mud again. I read the text, I read the lecture slides. I just don't have the concept yet. It *sounds* fine at first....multiple predictors for multiple criterion variables. Amount of variance accounted for by one predictor versus another, but then....if one variable accounts for 46% and then the next is 15% - does that mean that together they account for 61%, or does that 15% include overlap with the first predictor?

And so, here's the real problem. My brain is full. This just isn't getting in. There's no more room. And it's not like I'm so full of wisdom; it's full of quotations from Welcome Back Kotter, and perhaps my 40th sinus infection this year is also taking up a little room. So, even if I try to concentrate and figure my stats out, it's like the gears are jammed up with something sticky - probably placed there by little fingers who've been clutching Gerber toddler teething bars.

And so, for five days, I have dumbly stared at the first question on my stats homework:

a) Based on the chi-square distribution table what is the critical value that should be used to determine if outliers exist using an alpha level of .001? What is the maximum Mahalanobis Distance value for the participants in the sample?

Seriously, this should be so EASY. But my brain won't get past trying to figure out the degrees of freedom and does the dependent variable get included in this? Why can't I get my brain to budge?

Oh, and in case you're interested:

http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/Detecting_Outliers_-_Multivariate

Her Weeness.

I got Two hours of sleep last night. I am told it is because she is learning to walk. This does not seem reasonable. I am learning advanced statistics. I don't bother her about it.

You know, for a one year old, the kid is extraordinarily inconsiderate. When I'm nice enough to change her poopy diaper? She won't hold still. When I'm trying to hurry up and get her dressed? She won't shoot her arm through the sleeve. When I'm trying to sleep? She could care not a whit. She's pretty effin' cute on top of it all. It's annoying. She used to be cute and easygoing. Now she's cute and opinionated.

I also did something I didn't want to do, but I got desperate. I brought her into my bed to sleep with me. She LOVED this. She even made a happy little, ooo-oooh noise. This is like complaining about your base rate hotel room and getting moved to the Presidential suite (well, to a baby it is). So now? Yeah, she's going to want to sleep with mom. Sigh. We're *not* co-sleeping. I was just desperate. I mean, I didn't sleep at all anyway because I was afraid of rolling over on her or her falling off the bed, but at least she STFU.

WW isn't going that well because a sippy cup with pinot grigio and goldfish crackers have begun to serve as dinner. Goldfish crackers and diet coke: breakfast of champions.

I realize I am not the first to notice this or write about it. Okay. I am conflating blogginess with bitchiness.