August 30, 2007

The best show on television, Friday Night Lights, is starting its second season on Oct. 5. Austin narrowly avoided losing the filming of this show to New Mexico or Louisiana, and the show itself almost didn't get renewed. I think this show is consistently better than Weeds, The Closer, and Lost, with perhaps a tie with Heroes. I love watching it not just for the superb acting and plot lines, but for the glimpses of familiar sights around Austin in the background.

This is all to preface my latest FNL sighting of one Taylor Kitsch, who plays hunky bad-boy Tim Riggins on the show.
He came in to South Congress Cafe today and waited for a table behind us (we were eating in the bar area). Prior to this I have scoped out Kyle Chandler three different times, who plays Coach Taylor (also seen recently on Grey's Anatomy as the bomb specialist guy who gets blown up, and in the 1990's as the lead on Early Edition). He walks his Jack Russell Terrier around the area and lives in the State House Apartments on S. Congress.

August 29, 2007

Last day of work at my part-time research fellow job today. The professor who was never sufficiently impressed with me was finally impressed with the paper I wrote (yay!). Hopefully he'll write his sections and we can submit it for publication. I'll need to keep on him about that.

I'm now solely supported by my consulting income. It's scary but liberating, and I feel more adult-like somehow. Job prospects, as in a permanent full-time job, are scattered and disparate and I'm unsure how to "package" myself. I'm looking at both applied/practice and academic positions. One came up today at a Foundation in Los Angeles. Aren't houses that would be $250k here like a million dollars there? Geez. But it's an awesome position and they actually want someone with a PhD.

Not quite done with the dissertation yet -- give me two more weeks for a full draft (of crap, but a full draft o' crap).

August 21, 2007

My out of state driver's license, which I have stubbornly held on to for the last five years, is going to expire in about two weeks. I held on to it as incentive to get back to the place I came from before it expired, and well, that didn't happen. So now I have to get a stinky ole Texas driver's license, but I don't want to surrender my old one, because I like to keep stuff like that for the historical record I hold in various boxes in the back of my closet. Apparently it is against the law to have two valid licenses at the same time, so they take the old one when you go in. The thing to do is tell them I "lost it," but won't that look suspicious when they see that it is coincidentally expiring in two weeks? Plus I am a terrible liar. Won't they know I'm lying? Anyone have any advice? If I wait until the out of state one expires, they won't need to keep it but then I have to take the written driver's test - no way!
So, should I lie? Or should I just give it to them?

UPDATE: So I totally lied. I'm so proud. It was a little hairy for a while because at first they couldn't find my license record in the other state's database. But soon I will have the official license which will stand as a reminder of my failure to return to the promised land within five years. I know, I'm being overly dramatic. Too bad this license doesn't come with in-state tuition.

August 13, 2007

Someone just gave me a fortune cookie, and the fortune reads:

"To be mature is to accept imperfections."

I think I will put that on a t-shirt and wear it to my dissertation defense.

August 9, 2007

Momentary freak out over. Everything will work out. I just wish time would stand still for a little while.

August 7, 2007

Am I crazy for considering applying for an academic job in South Carolina? Is it true that committee members won't write a letter of recommendation unless they've seen a draft of your dissertation? What if the deadline for applying is before they will see a draft? I thought they didn't want to be bothered with seeing a draft before they absolutely have to. Who knows the answers to these questions? I really need to stop reading the message boards at the Chronicle of Higher Education because they give me heartburn.

I am cycling through my tri-monthly phase of thinking I could be perfectly content doing research as a professor somewhere (if someplace would have me). Truthfully, I have actually enjoyed the dissertation process once I got the hang of it, and it's made me think I could actually be good at this stuff. But then I think I would get bored and miss the glamorous life of social program evaluation. And could I really function productively without deadlines and clients? A survey of sociology PhDs found that non-academic jobs pay more and have less hours, but that they weren't as happy. Great. But I'm going to assume they had some crappy government job somewhere and really wanted to be a professor instead.

Oh, what to do.

August 2, 2007

I know I can be territorial and controlling (ya don't say!), but here's a situation that really has me fuming. We live in a duplex, and there is a shared storage building in the backyard that has a washer and dryer in it. The utilities that run the washer and dryer go to our side of the duplex, hence, whatever usage that happens is paid for by us. It's impossible to know exactly how much of our water, electricity, and gas bills come from the washer and dryer each month. We've just thought as long as the neighbors aren't excessive about it, we'll just deal rather than ask them for $5 a month or whatever (seems petty). But our neighbors have people stay with them every so often and these people use the machines too. It pisses me off that I'm subsidizing their laundry. Our neighbors have never asked who pays for those utilities and we haven't told them. M. doesn't want to be petty (cause he's a nice guy) and I loathe confrontation but this is getting under my skin.

August 1, 2007

Sent my advisor a revised Chapter 4 on Sunday. He finished editing it and I need to go pick it up today. It was 41 pages! I'm trying to get Chapter 5 worked out before the week is up: It's the chapter on the conditioning effects of depression and self-efficacy on strain, and how different levels of those variables affect the different kinds of outcomes I'm studying. The findings are interesting -- depression amplifies the effect of strain on outcomes like running away and suicidal behavior, but buffers the effect of strain on more externalized outcomes like aggressive delinquent acts and shoplifting. Those are the findings for girls. There are a couple of similarities in the boys' findings, but generally they don't hold for them. Self-efficacy seems to act as a buffer for both girls and boys, but more so for girls. Fascinating.

I had to re-run the interaction models because the first time I ran them (months ago) I didn't "mean center" the variables involved in the interaction. Apparently this is what you're supposed to do. I think it's kind of optional, but customary. It doesn't affect the results, just the interpretation of the results, and it also reduces multicollinearity between the interaction term and the variables that are multiplied together to create the interaction term. My adviser didn't think this was necessary, but I'm anticipating the comments from the rest of my committee. Anyway, so I created the new mean-centered variables for the girls and re-ran the analysis, updated the tables. Tonight I will do the same for the boys' sample, and then I can start augmenting Chapter 5 with some exposition about the findings. I need to get this DONE this week so I can focus on the conclusion -- what are the big findings, why, what do they mean, so what, etc. I will soon be going from "serious" mode into "Red Alert" mode (stole that from the blog Reassigned Time). Which means no more staying up until 1am watching non-stop episodes of "24."