On The Move…

God bless the people of Sumatra.  What awful news.

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It’s also sobering to hear that even my mother felt the tremors at home.

Oh, scrappy day.

I was distracted enough to miss my 1pm.  And that’s the least of it.

I’m going back to bed.  Wake me in the morning.

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I want to see a full, high-quality video of the Viktor & Rolf show.  Pretty unbelievable – I want to see these clothes on some covers and editorials (like that Dolce and Gabbana dress that’s everywhere right now).

Today I spent about 9 hours working hard… so that I can now be 18 hours behind where I was when I started.  I spent the whole afternoon trying to fix an anomaly in my dataset – I did all kinds of fancy analysis, read a bunch of related papers, hunted for corroborating or better datasets.  Then at about dinner time I found the problem and it was frustratingly simple: I had switched “Thailand” and “Tanzania” by mistake. 

*gargh*

But after correcting that substantial error I then discovered that all my previous analyses and empirical results (for/from which I had produced all kinds of fancy figures, tables and discursive text) were completely wrong.  Which was horrifying, to say the least.  So in an attempt to save this key quantitative section, I went back through the literature and reconstructed a new independent variable measure to correct for the other systematic error I knew was in the dataset. 

By midnight this new, improved dataset revealed….  exactly the same results I had from before, virtually.  Except now I have to completely re-write the accompanying substantive sections as well as make new tables and figures.

Which is how I’m now 18 hours behind where I was when I started, 9 hours ago.

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Haha, from the Chicago Manual of Style online:

“16.36  Avoiding overlong footnotes:  Lengthy, discursive notes should be reduced or integrated into the text.”

Ha!

Taking a little break to have some dinner at my desk.  I’m really just stalling on thesis work because I just spent all afternoon completing my dataset (for what I hope will be the last time, dear God) and I’m a little scared that the couple dozen new or revised observations will throw all my results off.  Eek.

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Here‘s a slightly bizarre track: Avril Lavigne singing the Mandarin version of “Girlfriend”.  At least her accent’s pretty good, I think.

Beyoncé looks to be setting some kind of record by releasing a music video for every one of the tracks on her album B’day.  She spoke briefly about a bunch of them on TRL.  Newly released out of this bunch is the video for “Beautiful Liar”, featuring Shakira.  I mention the video only because it’s pretty cool how they made Beyoncé and Shakira look like twins.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but when it’s cold my hands somehow become more prone to scrapes.  Today I managed to accumulate something like six or eight papercuts in four or five different incidents… by the end of the day I realised that my left hand was tingling from the cumulative effect.  In fact, I just washed my hands and each little cut is still smarting!

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As a postscript to what I wrote about Ellen Degeneres yesterday, I forgot to mention that it made me happy to find that Ellen’s myspace page actually showed the pictures she had taken of her and Clint Eastwood during the Oscars – the ones she had Steven Spielberg take for her, which was a hilarious gag to watch 🙂

Also, Ellen’s on the March 2007 cover of W magazine, in a glowing portrait by Michael Thompson.  I mention this more to note the scary/beautiful series of black-and-white portraits, also by Thompson, that accompany the feature.  I don’t know if it was intentional, but Ellen looks completely transformed in each of them, even though all the pictures feature the same hair and makeup.  When I first saw the magazine, I was struck by this effect: in the first she looks uncannily like Glenn Close, in the second she perfectly channels Princess Diana, and in the final poster-sized portrait she reminds me of Sharon Stone.  See the pictures here and see what you think.

PS: Since I mentioned Princess Diana, and in one of seminars today we participated in a fascinating, real-time negotiation role-play about the expansion of Camp Babylon in Iraq (which in reality has come under mounting criticism since 2004 for the damage that US military operations have done to that priceless archaelogical site), this piece of trivia seems relevant.  In a nutshell: later this year, Prince Harry is being deployed to Iraq on a tour of duty. 

The possibility for tragedy is really too horrible to contemplate.

Yup, this is going to be a long one.  But I’ll make it as brief as I can.

Brief, unlike the thesis footnotes I’ve been writing.  Yesterday, I spent just over two hours working on one part of my draft, and it went like this:

First five minutes:  I write a single, relatively unimportant sentence to support a sub-subclaim I want to make: “A simple scatter-plot of the same data with best-fit line indicates that this pair-wise correlation does not appear to be overly influenced by outliers, as seen in Figure 2*[26].” 

Next two hours:  I write Footnote 26, which is currently over 500 words long, and takes up about three quarters of that page.

Conclusion: I’m never going to finish writing this…!!!

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever felt this continuously pressé.  Every day it feels like I’ve committed some awful crime and I’m just doomed to waiting to be caught…  the awful crime being not having already completed my thesis, of course.  Quelle horreur!

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Miscellaneous (American) pop-culture observations for February 2007, aka “American Femininity” month:

(1) This seemed to have been a month of unsually high visibility for lesbians.  You had Ellen Degeneres hosting the Oscars, with her partner Portia de Rossi naturally making an appearance on the red carpet and at the after parties.  At the same Oscars, Melissa Etheridge performed “I Need to Wake Up“, a song she wrote for the film An Inconvenient Truth, inspired she said by Al Gore’s message about the need to address climate change.  When the song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song a little later, Melissa jumped up, kissed her partner Tammy Lynn Michaels and in her acceptance speech proceeded to thank her “incredible wife Tammy” and their four children.  On a related note, I have to say that I was extremely confused when reading this article from People covering the birth of Melissa and Tammy’s twins back in October last year.  I still can’t figure out exactly what the quote “these are our first two babies conceived together” means, from a clinical/genetics perspective…

(2) The national spotlight this past month was also cast a little further afield on motherhood in general.  Between Anna Nicole Smith’s unexpected death and Britney’s unexpected episodes, I’d say the outlook on all-American motherhood is looking a little tainted right now.  This is in contrast to last year, say, when we had periods of focusing on women like Nancy Pelosi (raised five children before running for office at 47!) or Angelina Jolie and Madonna’s admirable adoption decisions. (All this is in even starker contrast to last year’s focus on fathers, like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt who both became new dads.)

PS: And as a tenuously related bizarre pop culture “event” around women, let’s not forget about NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak…

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I’m going to quickly wrap up with my Oscars 2007 style observations:

(1) I feel bad for the women who wore things that the American public is unattuned to understanding (never mind liking).  I noticed in going through the “vote: love it or hate it?” slideshow on People.com that I very clearly skew European when it comes to style.  I especially felt bad for the ladies who chose Valentino (Anne Hathaway, Zhang Ziyi, Cameron Diaz), whose signature ruffles and bows are almost continuously reviled by the American public – although Cameron’s dress was admittedly not very flattering.  The same generally applies to people who wore this year’s Chanel (Kirsten Dunst, Penelope Cruz later in the night).  And of course I found Meryl Streep’s red carpet Prada ensemble both very witty as well as stylishly interesting (not to mention flattering), while most other viewers seemed to despise the look.

(2) In contrast, most voters seemed to love Liv Tyler in Marc Jacobs at the Vanity Fair party, which I did not.  So American. 

(3) I non-exhaustively loved:
On the red carpet: Jodie Foster in Vera Wang and Penelope Cruz in Versace… 
At the Vanity Fair party: Katie Holmes in Armani Privé and Natalie Portman in Lanvin…
Everywhere: Jennifer Hudson, whom I thought looked stunning throughout her multiple dress changes.

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Writing this was relaxing.  Now back to work!  *feels shoulder muscles tensing*

Have quite a lot I wanted to say: have multiple blog drafts waiting to be properly written.  However, I’m now very tired.  It’s very late.

Goodnight.

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PS: I must wake up to read Freud and Derrida in perhaps 6 hours.

Every day it becomes startlingly clearer that I am running out of thesis-writing time.  The panic feels almost palpable.  *heart pounds*

And right now I am mocked by the arrival of the huge Spring editions of the various glossy magazines to which I subscribe 🙁

Back to work.

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PS: Given my recent discussions around social constructivsm as well as Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, this article from today’s Washington Post caught my eye.  The premise is clear from the article’s title: “Was Repressed Memory a 19th-Century Creation?”, and is based on work led by a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist that suggests that the repression of traumatic memories as a psychiatric disorder is a fairly recent “culture-bound syndrome”.  Somewhat unusually, the evidence cited is an extensive literary search that has as yet revealed no cases of traumatic memories being repressed and then later recovered prior to the 19th century.  This is unlike, say, cases of schizophrenia or depression that have been documented across cultures across a wide range of historical literature.

Yipes, we’ve had a pretty full day.

Surprise news from two friends.  Pretty surprising news – surprising enough that I felt glum and drained for a bit.

A surprise comment, much more pleasant of a surprise, although it made me feel a little bad too – this is why it’s easier to lavish praise than to give criticism, I think.  I’ll have to deal with it some other time though.

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Almost all of my afternoon, evening and night was spent struggling with just one fiddly aspect of my dataset.  I feel like I just worked on a very hard, very long Ec problem set, and I’m *still* not done.   What’s particularly frustrating is that the cumulative 30+ hours that has been spent on just this single, very simple indicator will probably translate into an overlooked line in my thesis: “Data for per capita GDP measured in constant 2000 US$ was compiled for the respective country years (see details in Appendix II, Section b)”.

Arghgh.  Never mind that of course the countries I’m working with have terribly patchy, approximate or non-existant economic/demography/weather time-series data.  And that the different sources I’ve had to reconstruct my data from have used non-equivalent reporting choices and naming conventions.  Plus of course I’m not exactly an expert on how to interpret and manipulate PPP, constant/current LCU and deflators to get exactly what I want.  Trust me, it was a lot harder than it seems.  More accurately, it remains a lot harder than it seems – I’m not even done because I simply cannot get the figures for Afghanistan to look plausible so I’m clearly doing something wrong.

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Meanwhile, in a much happier place (relative to where I am with work), Milan fashion week continues.  I haven’t had much of a chance to look through the collections, and womenswear is so impossible to keep abreast of anyway.  Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m impressed at how Miuccia Prada translated the vision she presented at her menswear show into womenswear, given how difficult that vision was (I especially remember the ultra-fuzzy, slightly boxy, enveloping sweaters and coats).  And Cavalli really surprised me with the direction he’s taking, further and further away from what he’s known for – I’ll have to look at the collection again to decide whether I prefer the new restrained and lady-like classicism to his more theatrical, super-glamorous previous work.  And Dolce & Gabbana!  Oh!  It was pretty much everything we’ve come to expect from that runway – super-strong, aggressively sexy, stunningly iconographic ensembles and dresses.  In contrast, the Gucci womenswear seemed much more subdued, and at first glance appeared to be missing some of the confidence of the menswear.

Time for bed.