I documented my day today. It wasn’t an unusual Tuesday, but my days aren’t all like this; I have classes only three days a week and often have a dance practice or something else scheduled. Also, I only wake to an alarm a couple days a week. Still, I think this gives a sense of what I’m working on, the pace, and intensity.
7:45am—Woke to an alarm after more than 8 hours of sleep but kind of groggy and nauseous (not uncommon), and a little dehydrated. Rolled out of bed in about ten minutes. Tamed my bedhead a bit, opened my shades. It’s raining but not hard. I took a photo for the blog and I look grumpy, probably because I am grumpy.
Bedroom Window
Grumpy
Breakfast
Made my oatmeal like I usually do, with a lot of cinnamon and ginger, a big handful of raisins, and with butter and agave nectar on top. Delicious!
Said good morning to a couple early-rising housemates, Kyla and Nick.
Packed my computer bag full of school files. Also rain gear, fruit, a salad, workout gear (optimistically), my water bottle, PDA, and camera.
My Load For the Day
Rain Gear
Bike
8:35—Out the door. I bike fifteen minutes to school, mostly on a trail next to the Willamette River. It’s very pretty. The light is grey, the leaves yellow, and it’s cool, not cold.
Bike Trail 1
Bike Trail 2
Bike Trail 3
Bike Trail 4
Bike Trail 5
Willamette River
Franklin Blvd
Straub Hall
Computer Lab
8:50—Lock my bike up at Straub Hall, the psychology building on the University of Oregon campus. I go to the computer lab and start working on a homework assignment for my statistics class (called Applied Data Analysis) that’s due at 3 pm. It’s due every week at 3 pm and usually takes 12-15 hours to complete (and that’s not including the 5-9 hours of reading I have to summarize as part of it, full of sentences like “So, the regression coefficients associated with the contrast-coded categorical predictors in this model that includes their interactions with the covariate tell one about simple mean effects when and only when the covariate equals zero”). I spent 10 hours on the homework, already, over the weekend.
Karyn
9:30—I meet with Karyn, the TA for Applied Data Analysis, and grill her with questions about the homework for 40 minutes. She is very smart and patient.
Labmates
10:10—Back to work in the computer lab. Now several of my classmates are working alongside me. It’s stressful because of how involved the thinking is, and because of how many elements I have to remember and pull together, but it’s also fun, because we’re all in it together. No one else spent all weekend on it or went to see Karyn, though, so I end up doing a more helping than getting helped. It’s good—I understand things much better after I have to make a case for them. We go straight through with no breaks. Instead of my hoped-for lunch (not to mention workout) I eat the banana and apple I brought and drink a half gallon of water.
2:40pm—I email in my homework, 13 pages, 15 hours and 40 minutes long (I’ll post it for fun under ‘writing’), and ride to the local Whole-Foods clone for lunch: a chicken thigh and two bagels. I’m feeling hyped up and pretty good.
Lunch
3:00—Back to the computer lab, I eat them, along with the salad I brought, as I write a weekly update for my practicum: I’m interning 10 hours a week at a residential treatment center for adjudicated youth. I wrote about a “Responsible Decision Making” class I sat in on with them, about homophobia, and how it related to a article I’m reading, called “Prejudice as Self-Image Maintenance: Affirming the Self Through Derogating Others.” It’s about some experiments that found people (successfully) use prejudice to feel better about themselves when they are put down.
Gerlinger Hall
3:35—I ride to Gerlinger Hall, where my first class is, and finish eating while I read for my Social Psychology class (the paper I mentioned above) and swap homework war stories with another stats student.
4:00—Applied Data Analysis, taught by Dr. Holly Arrow. The lecture is on factorial ANOVAs, which is a method of analyzing data from experiments with multiple independent or quasi-independent variables. I understand most of it. It’s a graduate level class, mostly for undergrads doing honors theses, like I am. It’s really difficult and often confusing but also fun and exciting because it’s such a challenge, and because my classmates are so smart—it’s (exactly) like being in a class that consists of only the one or two other smartest and hardest-working people from all of my other classes. There’s a sense of camaraderie—we can just look at each other and shake our heads, laughing, knowing what we are all going through.
Applied Data Analysis 1
Applied Data Analysis 2
5:20—Ride down the hill to Lillis Hall. It’s dark now, and raining pretty hard. Still not cold, though. It’s been a beautiful day.
5:30—Social Psychology, taught by Sean Laurent, who is also my honors thesis advisor. He’s an entertaining lecturer and the material is all of this counterintuitive stuff about how people are (usually without knowing it) shaped by their situation. For the first time in the term I haven’t done all of the reading for a class (didn’t finish the paper I mentioned above) but it didn’t hurt me. We covered it in a hurry at the end and I have a slightly slower day tomorrow, so I can catch up. We talk first about attitude change and how emotional and intellectual persuasion work best together: Someone is more likely to quite smoking when shown a photo of a diseased lung along with information on how to quit smoking than with neither or just one of those, for example. Then we talked about research on stereotyping and how it relates to death sentences (pretty shocking stuff—worse even than I thought), prejudice, and self-esteem boosting. A classmate, Annalisa, brought a bunch of leftover Halloween candy and I eat a few gummy creatures and body parts. Not great.
Social Psychology - Class
Social Psychology - Sean
6:50—Class is over but I hang out, asking Sean a few more questions about the stereotyping research.
7:15—Ride back to Straub, go upstairs to a lab and work on my honors thesis. I finalize my new measures and manipulations, compose a modification document for the Institutional Review Board, and send it all to Sean to go over before I send it in. These are the final changes to my experiment—ideas I got from my lab when I did my project presentation a couple weeks ago. I’m strengthening the manipulation and adding a couple of measures, like one that asks how much you like your name. Did you know that how much you like your name is a reliable measure of self-esteem? During this process, I see that Patrick Johnston, an old friend of mine from high school, has friended me on Facebook. I’m pretty excited about that. He was one of my favorite people at Yucca Valley High and I haven’t talked to him in almost two decades. No time to make contact now, though.
8:50—I pack up and leave campus. It’s not raining anymore and it’s a really nice ride home. My mind is going strong, thinking, thinking, thinking. Thinking about writing this, partly.
Dinner
9:10—Make and eat a light dinner, salad and a couple cheddar-in-corn-tortilla quesadillas. (Oh, and my current supplements, calcium/magnesium/D and fish oil.) The house is dark. My housemates are either gone or sleeping already.
9:30—Begin writing this, listening to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, my favorite album of my year, so far. In my enthusiasm for the post, I forget that it’s my night to clean the kitchen, leaving it for the third time this term for Kyla to clean tomorrow. (Sorry, Kyla!)
Desk
Stretching Out Space
10:40—Time to chill out and get ready for bed: clean my teeth, stretch, meditate, go over my choreography a couple times, sing a song, and do my daily chart, journal entry, and gratitude prayer. In bed by 11:30.
Bed
Anyway, I’ve just started learning some choreography with my friend and teacher, Karly, thinking it’s the best way to increase my working vocabulary. (This is her, upside-down, dancing with Russ, a guy from Portland.) Swing dancing is almost always improvised, so I’ve learned very little choreography and I’ve found it quite challenging when I have tried it, remembering what to do next, and it’s reminded me of how I feel on the dance floor, racking my brain for something interesting to do. I imagine that learning this choreography will help my musicality and style, as well. It’s a dance by two of my favorite swing dancers, Todd Yannacone and Naomi Uyama. They are improvising, not doing choreography, but what they do is so musical! The song (a great one, by Duke Ellington) is moderately fast but they look relaxed and they hit the quirky little rhythmic phrases in such an effortlessly cool way, like the hit at :45, and the bu-bu-bum-bum at :55. I also like how they flow between Lindy (the circular stuff), Charlseton (the kicky stuff), tandem Charleston (the back-to-front kicky stuff), jazz steps, and just screwing around. And I love how much fun they look like they are having. They obviously know and really like the song and like dancing with each other. Here it is:
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 