Lately, I’ve been very frustrated, but not as much as Sandy, who has decided to start throwing fisticuffs at her reflection. I’ll take responsibility; I’ve been tickling her stomach every night until she’s annoyed enough to screech and slap at my hands. Even at nine years old, I can sense that she’s coming out of her shell and becoming more playful. While this is great fun for me, it’s likely less fun for the cat that lives in the glass bookshelf. For too long has mirror-cat enjoyed stalking the living room uncontested. Sandy, ever the shy one, has decided at last to stand up for herself and beat the absolute shit out of my furniture.

I really wanted to take a creative writing class this semester but can’t fit it into my schedule. I don’t know why it’d bother me so much since, after all, I’m not in the creative writing program, but I think it’s possible I’m just generally frustrated with the lack of time to pursue things I really love. There are things I love about statistics; and I know that, like all things, there is beauty there, but the endless grind of tests and grades and work just crushes me. What’s left, then, is just this really nasty feeling of ‘No matter how hard or dull, I just need to get through this next thing.’ When things get their darkest, which I have noticed often coincides with scrolling through the Jobs section of Linkedin, I ask myself, wait, I thought you came all this way looking for the reset button, a chance to make something of a life you actually might like, is this what it’s going to be?

Recently I’ve been trying to reframe statistics as an art, which is something statisticians say. Normally, I find this unconvincing, not because of the argument itself but with my disdain for the person saying it. But indulge me and take writing, for example. To read someone’s writing is to see the whole of the world through their eyes. The universe, unobserved, is immeasurable, but observation makes it as tangible as skin. Now, in statistics, we estimate parameters whose true value is unavailable to us. We say, hmm, no, I can’t tell you what this value actually is, but with some luck I might be able to tell you something about its underlying structure. And so, when you take a step back, these things look pretty similar. I mean, that’s in a nutshell what art means to me, an unfitting description of the truth.

It rained heavily on Monday and flooded the bike rack area in front of the apartment. I haven’t lived here long, but the storm had a real sense of finality to it, one last sputtering breath to push everyone into spring. On the way into Sacramento today, the mountain tops were as white as I’d ever seen them. For some reason, I kept thinking about how much I wished I liked to ski.