Ignorance is Bliss

. . . when you're riding a bike with a billowing skirt and all the men walking towards you can't take their eyes off you because a gust of wind just swept through.

The best part of the scene isn't that I might be flashing lots of unsuspecting strangers before breakfast (pretty much every other day given my skirt habits and the weather).

The point is that I can now ride a bike with one hand on the bar and the other holding down my skirt, while dodging fast cars/ bikes because I'm riding against traffic.

 I can now ride a bike. Boom, baby.

When I was 4, I was a high flyer on that tricycle. Then the third wheel came off and I started losing playground races.

When I was 14, I gritted my teeth and rode a bike to conform to the Messick stereotype of athletic, outdoorsy kids and crashed into a horse. A stationary horse hooked to a carriage. My face tasted horse sweat and my shins concrete. I narrowly missed the warm pile of grass green manure.

When I was 21, I promised a boyfriend a romantic day biking around Santa Monica to make up for past whatevers. He yelled at me because I nearly got run over by buses and nearly ran over old ladies. I thought I was already doing pretty good. That was the last time I saw him.

When I was 22, I mentioned casually to a friend that I would be running home to grab something. He tossed me his public bike rental card. Sheer embarrassment forced me to the bike rack. It took me 35 min to bike home when normally it took me 15 min to walk.

But hey. 35 min turned into 25 and then 20. I'm still stuck at 15 min though. Perhaps I just bike slow. Or I just walk really fast.

Justification

27 hours & 24 pages later, I finally handed in my 328 econometrics midterm.

That's how I justified doing absolutely nothing school-related this entire weekend.

But now my workaholic self is wagging her little fingers and reprimanding me quite a bit.

So I just took a nap and shut her up.

---

And now we're back, working on that six hour midterm due tonight.

Split personality? Oh definitely.

328

I've only ever asked four or five people about the legendary Econometrics class (or Stats) that all IR majors have to take. One was in the middle of throwing his papers onto the floor and stomping on them. The other simply burst into tears. While it was by no means a representative sample where n > 30 and I can compute a z-score and p-value, it was enough for me.

So, I procrastinated it till the one of the last semesters of my college career. And I promised that I wouldn't cry over it. And to recycle my old assignments in a civil manner.

On the first day of my Econometrics class, somebody asked how hard the class would be. The professor smirked and threw up a slide with quotes from previous students:

"I spent more than twenty hours a week on this class."

(The following one is the professor's favorite)

"Imagine getting kicked in the face while doing incline push-ups in the mud. That is pretty much how I felt taking this class. It was the most intense class I have ever taken, and at some points made me consider taking up drinking. I get anxious just walking past the MARB now because of this class."

Sadistically, I've enjoyed it so far. But I don't think people around me have. The mean amount of time I spend talking to people about stuff not related to econometrics, Golden Key, TA job, and church is probably 15 minutes, with a standard deviation of five minutes.

But I'm reaching the point where the trade off of immaculate weekly projects and relationships is getting too steep.

And I already broke one of my promises.

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Yet another all-nighter, here I go.

Punctuate My Love

Sometimes, reading old love letters is painful. I can't help it - I just linger over every misplaced comma, cringe at all the misused contractions that make me into body parts ("you're beautiful eyes"), and agonize over run-on sentences that could have been easily fixed with elegant semi-colons.

Young Women leaders have drilled into my head that "spouse who understands the necessity of spaces within ellipses (space dot space dot space dot space)" is not appropriate for my future husband list . . .  but surely a comma-conscious man is not too much to ask for?

Comparative Advantage

I spent four and a half hours on my econ homework today. And this was easier than my previous one.

In econspeak, this subject just isn't my comparative advantage.  While I'm furiously scribbling class notes, trying to breathe life into the PPFs and the indifference curves, the guy behind me keeps a running commentary on the professor's handwriting, poses and answers his own rhetorical questions, and chuckles at how easy this class is. The opportunity cost (OC) of me doing econ homework is so much higher than this slick-hair guy's. In that time, I could have written a political science paper, done my laundry, washed the dishes, blogged, baked some bread, ate said bread, and wrecked havoc in my room - all while watching a movie.

I bet that my friend Andrew Woo, econ guru slash TA, could even blog about this faster than I could. After all, all he would do is use the marginal product of labor and divide the beta by the alpha to obtain my OC of doing homework versus that of the commentary dude and then wrap it up with a clean relative supply/demand graph.

Piece of cake.

Sisi in LSAT-land

I fell down a rabbit hole of law school prep. And found myself at a mad tea party of students who are trying to make sense of the LSAT.

Everything is topsy-turvey in LSAT-land. The logic questions will have you believe that some shy people are extroverts and that in order to prove that you're not a communist, you'll have to advocate totalitarian states. Common sense has no place here; the faster you are at accepting crazy ideas, the better.

The questions just seem like riddles that the mad hatter makes up for fun. And like Alice, sometimes I just don't want to play anymore.

All the while, the March Hare is telling me that time is running out and the law school Queen of hearts is pointing at me and yelling, "Off with her head!"

But I must admit, LSAT-land is growing on me. Like the grinning Chesire cat, formal logic is at once strange and fascinating. We're holding a March LSAT Madness where we fill in the brackets with hard LSAT logic games and vote for them. The hardest game wins the season.

And I'll be honest - I'm really excited for it.

When you wish upon a star

I woke up this morning startled to find all my lights still on, laptop resting against my legs, and the heavyweight LSAT prep book resting underneath my head. I was sprawled across the bed, with other LSAT books framing either side of me. Soon I'll be dreaming LSAT logic games. I suppose in some ways, going to law school might eventually be a dream come true :p

Copyright-worthy word

Last night, my friends and I were going strong hitting the econ books at 1 a.m. (which was not a good idea since our test was at 7 a.m. this morning). Somewhere in between trying to figure out the myriad of questions on how much ice cream sundae Ooh Soofat (seriously) likes to eat, talking about things like circumcision and drinking milk, and eating a chocolate mug cake at midnight, we came up with a fabulous new word:

FEMONOPOLY :[fem-muh-no-puh-lee]
- noun, plural- ies

1. Exclusive female control over/access to the boys in a certain area
2. The dating market condition where there is one girl to multiple guys
3. Example: In a study group situation

Disclaimer: I was not the only girl in my study group so I'm guessing that my situation was a competitive market where you better be the most efficient at attracting "buyers" (min Average total cost = price = marginal cost!).