Well, here I sit.  Not doing anything.  It's kind of refreshing, really.  Although I know that I should be doing something else.  I don't want to.  I don't have to until tomorrow.

I think tomorrow I will go to another church, Aletheia.  I am going to see my grandparents for lunch at Uno as they'll be coming through on their way to Florida!  After that, I think I'll see if there's a coffee shop or something where I can sit and do homework for hours before Common Ground starts at Cornerstone.

Graduate school is going okay so far.  Although I keep going between a few different states of mind, for example, between "busy" and "AAAA!  I'm going to die!"  Yes, a warning for all you people out there who are considering going to graduate school...it's hard.  At least being a full-time student is.  I wish I didn't have to be, but then I'd need a job as well as going to school...technically my TA position is a job.  But it seems more like school because I have to go to class for it. 

I have no one to live with.  I wouldn't want to live alone in an apartment or a house.  I'd want a good roommate.  I am hoping to find a good roommate and an apartment before I have to move out of the dorm next year.

It's weird not being on a meal plan.  I make most of my own meals here in my room.  I am extremely thankful for compact refrigerators, and I am becoming proficient in microwave cookery!  Even so, I want my own kitchen.  And a kitchen sink (or better yet, a dishwasher).  It is very annoying carting my dishes back and forth from the bathroom.  I never realized how many dishes one uses to create a single meal.  I do enjoy my weekend shopping trips, though...once a week, I get out and buy stuff!  Mostly food.  And things used to prepare food.  Food is good.  It is a little difficult buying groceries for a single person.  Everything seems to come in packages meant for families... :(  But I manage.  I just eat the same thing for lunch for a few days in a row.

I miss my family.  They're all back in the good ol' Midwest, and I'm here in the Mid-Atlantic. 

I miss Caleb.  But he's coming to visit next week!  He will be coming in on Saturday and staying with Jeff.  It seems like forever since I've seen him, but I saw him for Labor Day weekend just last month.

(I think I've been reading too much lolcats...I keep wanting to write things like, "Iz gon be diffacult.")

These next four years are going to be difficult.  For more than one reason.

I only get a few weeks off in the summer.

I've moved out without meaning to.

What a crazy couple weeks!  Wow!  So much has happened!

Where to begin?

I think I'll just summarize by state.
-Tennessee: See LJ, Hannah, Michelle, Matt, Caleb.  Go to Mississippi with LJ and Matt.
-Mississippi:  no A/C, windows down all the way.  Beautiful wedding.  Return to TN.
-Back in TN:  Church with Caleb and family, hang out lots. Officially start dating Caleb!  :)  Pack car, stow extra stuff with Caleb.  Visit with Cassie, Tim, and Leighton along with LJ, Hannah, and Caleb.  Trip to Pocket with Caleb.  Go to Stacy's for the night.  Breakfast with Stacy, begin trip to VCU.
-Virginia:  Trip to VCU.  Frustration.  City hard to navigate in a car.  Horrid first day.  Partially moved in.  Sleep.  Next few days not bad, slowly unloading car/unpacking.  Biostatistics orientation.  Go to Richmond airport to fly to Michigan for a wedding.
-Michigan:  See family one last time.  Lovely wedding.  See Grandma and Aunt Sarah once more.  Sunday School with Saint Greg.  Go to Detroit airport for flight back to Richmond.
-Virginia:  Continue unpacking.  Medical Center Graduate student orientation.  Free lunch!  Biostats departmental introductions and snacks.  Make new friend Jennifer.

All this happened between Wednesday, August 5 and today.  I could write a book with the details.

A few of my friends made fun of me the other day because I did something very simple.  I covered up the TV.  I will admit that I gave a stupid answer when they asked why.  I said, "It's like a one-eyed monster that stares at me!"

Now, this statement can use some unpacking.  A little background first.  Unlike many Americans, I grew up in a home where the TV was not the center of attention.  In fact, the TV still lives in the basement, so you have to go downstairs to even use the thing.  This leaves the entire upper floor available for a little-known convention known as conversation...which, I have found, is generally more worth my time than sitting in the dark staring at a lighted box for hours.

The "one-eyed" phrase is pretty self-explanatory, I think.  Televisions normally only have one screen.

I consider televisions to be monsters.  They are monsters in that they destroy any train of thought or any attempt at conversation, at least for me.  When a TV is on in the room, I will pay attention to that rather than to the living, breathing human being sitting next to me.  And I hate that.  Granted, it's not the TV's fault, but it sits there and screams for attention.  This is why I have such a problem with televisions in restaurants.  They used to be reserved for sports bars and Coney Islands.  Not anymore.  There are TVs in McDonald's, for crying out loud!  There's a TV in my college cafeteria (it is used as a message board, but it's still a TV).  I find conversation over meals much more pleasant than randomly standing in the hallway or on the phone, but I guess restaurants just want to shut their customers up so they eat and run and make room for more customers.  Televisions are like parasites.  Or some kind of cancer.  I think "monster" is a good word to describe the things.  A monster that eats conversation.

Televisions stare at me.  Televisions are meant to be on, spewing images and sounds of a distorted reality into the brain.  When a television is off, its surface reflects back images of real things in the room in a distorted manner, which, I suppose, merely continues its job even when it is off.  It is also a temptation.  The powered-down TV wants to be used.  It asks that I put in a movie or turn on a show when I should be doing something else.  Am I not allowed to avoid temptation?  And there's always the slight fear that someone has actually figured out how to keep track of people through their televisions.  Thank you, George Orwell.

Another reason to cover up a TV is so that you can do more with your furniture.  If the TV is in a cabinet or covered up somehow, no one cares that you put chairs that don't face it.  You can make the living room a conversation room, where the chairs face each other instead of facing the one-eyed monster.

Don't get me wrong.  It's not that I hate TV.  I hate its invasive distraction.  I watch my fair share of movies and shows on DVD.  But sometimes I wish I didn't.  There's got to be more out there.  Something better.

To start off, I would like to announce that this is not my idea.  I believe that this concept was discovered by my esteemed colleagues Matthew S. and Jenny F.  I do not claim to understand the concept fully.  I plan to explore it here.

The Female Happiness Quotient (FHQ)

The basic idea is this:
A female human becomes increasingly happier the more that she rotates about a fixed axis ("spins") up to the point of dizziness, sickness, or exhaustion, at which the happiness level declines.  The caveat is sometimes excluded.

We adopt a general formula to demonstrate the mathematics behind this concept.

Where y is the happiness of the female, x is the duration of spinning (adjusted for speed and axis of rotation), and q is the coefficient of happiness (derived in part from the ratio of spinning to happiness, hence the word "quotient" in the title of the concept).   The coefficient of happiness is always greater than 0.

A graph may help.

 

This shows a simple FHQ graph with q = 3.  We disregard any values of y < 0 (happiness may seem to be negative, but that is deceptive as the sadness factor is the cause for such a feeling).  As we can see, the happiness level rises to a certain point, then begins to fall as the spinning continues.  Some FHQs are more difficult to calculate depending on the female in question, but the principle remains roughly the same.

It has been debated that there is no point at which a female begins to lose happiness, and so the graph would be linear or logarithmic in its increase.  This may be the case for certain females, but most follow the general formula given, at least loosely.

This idea is still a theory as of yet, but it has proven to be the general case for several known females, and has yet to be disproved.

The study of the Female Happiness Quotient began during a social rhythmic movement gathering at which females were noted to smile and continue to smile while spinning.  Their expressions were happier than normal after the spinning stopped, although without much spinning afterward, they continued to decline to normal.


*Correction*  I have been informed by my colleagues that the credit for the original discovery of this concept should be attributed to Nathaniel W. and his brother.  My apologies.