Yes, I’ve been black, but when I come back you’ll know, know, know.

Amy Winehouse

Is Facebook a relationship market? If so, it’s another example of a market characterized by an imbalanced sex ratio. Per the data cited in this infographic (from 2010), there are 1.28 female FB-ers for every 1 male user. The extent of the gender gap in usage, though, varies by age bracket.

Look-see:

Do birds of a feather flock together or—Thank you, Paul Abdul—do opposites attract?¹ If you’re quacking, you’re correct. No need to reinvent the wheel here; McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook said it well:

“Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people’s personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics.”

The people in our social networks look a lot like we do, but why? Part of the reason has to do with the demographic characteristics of the places and spaces in which we spend our time—think of your neighborhood or workplace or some extracurricular group (like a running group or a…I don’t know, what do people do in their spare time?). These tend to be demographically homogenous: people of similar racial/ethnic and class backgrounds concentrate in certain parts of town and certain types of jobs and so forth.² This is more or less the opportunity structure for social interactions created by physical proximity—who’s around you on a day-to-day basis? We’re more likely to form close ties with people near than far and/partly because seeing people regularly provides a shared context that makes it possible to form bonds.³

Forming relationships with others who are like you in a variety of ways is the norm. There are, however, degrees of homophily/heterophily.  I may have just made up that second word. But put differently, our membership in some groups is more important than membership in others and can determine the extent to which we engage with and form close relationships with people outside the group. By “close relationship,” I mean the kind of relationship that involves confiding or asking for money⁴. Close relations are those you depend on in crisis.

One of the ways that this is framed within the study of religious organizations is strictness. How strict is a denomination or specific church? Strictness depends on the absolutism of a group’s belief system—like how black and white its truth claims are (e.g. is Jesus the only path to salvation and how do you get to Jesus anyway?)—as well as how much the doctrines and norms of the group encourage or require the group members to focus their activities within the group.

Members of strict churches tend to concentrate their activities within the church both because the norms of the group encourage them to do so and because the norms discourage them from pursuing other kinds of activities.  <It’s Wednesday night, for example—are you working on your dissertation at the pub or are you at bible study? And which of these are going to result in words of praise from your fellow church members as opposed to castigating facial expressions?>

Since propinquity, or nearness, is one of the primary social factors involved in relationship formation, church strictness matters for religious individuals looking to settle down <if that expression applies here>. Propinquity can refer to both geographic and institutional proximity—the kind of physical nearness that comes from being in a neighborhood (geographic) or a workplace or social organization (institutional) with someone as noted above.

As a result of institutional propinquity and the norms governing social interaction in such churches, singles in strict churches are faced with a different set of options for partnering than singles in mainline churches. Theologically, the former emphasize exclusivity of belief (the importance of spouse sharing this exclusivity may be implicit or explicit), while the latter are more pluralistic in orientation. Socially, membership in a strict church suggests that more time spent will be spent in activities related to the church (and hence in the company of other church community members) than would be true for members of mainline, or less strict, churches.

Institutional propinquity and strictness combine to create marriage markets in some churches.

<And stop. I’ve read the last three paragraphs so many times and it is now so late that I can’t tell whether my argument sounds tautological. It should say: people associate with others like themselves. This includes associations like church. Some churches are strict. Members of strict churches are pretty involved in their churches at the expense of involvement in other groups in their free time. Involvement in a strict church is also important to the identity of the member—part of the reason so much time is spend in church activities. Strict churches, then, are a kind of marriage market because of the priority given to involvement in church activities, time spent in them, and opportunity for meeting a potential mate. So…the latter parts need developing I’m seeing. Getting sloppy…sleep…>

1. I wasn’t thinking of the title, of the article I’m about to reference when I wrote that first sentence earlier today, but ever the sociologist it makes sense that I’d think in disciplinary catchphrases. And so: McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily and Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology, 2001
2. I know this only pushes the question back a step—Well, then, why are these homogeneous—but I’m ill-equipped to address that one at that moment
3. Like getting closer to a co-worker through a joint hatred of a boss or a workplace banality
4. which is one way that sociologists determine the closeness of a social tie. How many of your friends could you, would you call if you found yourself suddenly in need of $100?

Paul Silvia, Assoc. Professor of Psychology at UNC-Greensboro, has been our guest <using my professional work pronoun here> on campus this week. This afternoon, Paul gave a talk on developing better writing habits–the title of which says it all: “The Writing Habit: Thoughts on Writing More (Often).” His message was a simple one. And if you’ve sought advice on writing more regularly or less painstakingly, you’ll be familiar with the general outline:¹ To write, you have to write. And to write you have to schedule the time to do it and guard the time you schedule from intruders. Doing this develops a habit free from the hills and valleys of impulsivity (i.e. the notion that you can only write when you “feel it”).

Habit, unlike other behavioral motivators, doesn’t necessarily have a valence. Whereas impulse directs you to do what’s appealing in the moment and willpower is what you harness to follow through with a behavior based on the value it represents, habit just is.² It’s the drive to do what you always do.  Or, to quote Silvia, Impulsivity is a hipster, but Habit “wears an ’80s members only jacket, and it does it without irony.”³ It does it because it’s comfortable.

Now there’s plenty to be said for getting uncomfortable every once and a while and for the tyranny of routine <I mean seriously>, but there are other lovely adages like “practice makes perfect” that suggest that making a habit out of writing has its own value.

Perfectionism, on the other hand, has less to recommend.

"Perfectionism dimensions and research productivity in psychology professors: Implications for understanding the (mal) adaptiveness of perfectionism."

This article, published in the Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science in 2010, chronicled the research habits of academic psychologists and found that, as the psychologists in the study became more perfectionistic, they published less and their work wasn’t as strong.

Perfectionism–just as much as procrastination–keeps you from doing. “Once you’ve been around long enough, you realize there’s nothing you can write that people won’t hate.” And, here, by “people,” Paul  meant that we all have our critics, but worrying about them will only keep you from moving forward with your work.

I write this Silvian interlude, in part, by way of explaining <and on a personal level bolstering> this 40 DD effort. The questions I’ve fielded about the rationale for blogging my dissertation have often centered on intellectual property concerns like, “Aren’t you afraid somebody is going to steal your ideas?” I suppose it’s healthy to expect scholastic baseness at this level of the game, but somehow I’m unconcerned. It seems far more important to build a writing habit in a way that conveys the difficulty and messiness of doing so–one that showcases the refinement of ideas, the challenges of refinement in the trenches of more mundane responsibilities (parenting, job, meager social life, maintenance of mental health), and the process through which this all occurs. Tear down the curtain; let’s see the wizard, right?

In any case, so says Paul the Lenten Apostle, “It’s a turtle message rather than a hare message.” Let it be known.

1. e.g. Bob Boice’s Advice for New Faculty Members, Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, and Silvia’s own How to Write a Lot
2. Avoid thinking of “bad habits” like smoking, which actually is an addiction, right? Relatedly, do you, like me, wonder what the exact difference is between habit and addiction? Is the latter simply the former mixed with impulse? I digress…
3. I think the extent to which I enjoyed this example betrays a greater degree of hipsterism than I’d otherwise admit.

In the example I gave previously (on 40 DD No. 2)…

If I’m a pious and eligible bachelorette, my options for finding a compatible pious bachelor are limited in the general and the specific. In the general—like, say, looking at the gender gap for Evangelical Protestants in the US, which is 12-15% there are fewer of them than there are of me nationwide. In the specific—like, say, at my church—there are fewer of them than there are of me in the very place where I might seek a religious mate.

…I used Evangelical Protestantism because that is the religious tradition that has caught my interest for looking at relationship markets in a religious context.  With about 12% more women than men, it’s not the greatest intra-tradition gender gap—the gap is larger for Historically Black Churches, among others—but is still sizable.

In fact, below is a chart from Pew depicting the gender composition of various religious traditions whose inclusion I debated given that Pew’s classification of Evangelical Protestantism differs from the classification associated with the 12% gap. In short, the Pew data classify respondents as Evangelical, first, if they report belonging to a traditionally/historically Evangelical denomination. But if that’s not clear from their response to the denomination question,¹ they then use the respondent’s answer to whether they would identify themselves as “born-again or Evangelical Christian.”  Now this may seem like a straightforward way to address the denominational uncertainty, but actually, the born-again identity <Bourne-again identity?> isn’t terribly helpful: 41-44% of Americans (Baylor Religion Surveys vs. the Pew survey) claim the label. Using the born-again question, then, is likely to inflate Pew’s Evangelical numbers.

In any case, regardless of the size of the gender gap(s):

Gender Composition by Religious Tradition: http://religions.pewforum.org/comparisons#

To refer to groups of denominations as religious traditions means that they share origins and histories and, as a result, a culture. There’s a well-known paper within the sociology of religion that codifies religious traditions based on this premise (Steensland et al., 2000, though sometimes it’s just called RELTRAD. I know this is as important to you as it is to me.)² This is the academic way of saying it:

Denominations are part of larger religious traditions with well-elaborated set of creeds, teaching, rituals, and authority structures. These dimensions of religious culture shape members’ nonreligious attitudes for well-grounded historical reasons.

The authors go on to distinguish between Mainline and Evangelical Protestantism.  The latter denominations…

Have typically sought more separation from the broader culture, emphasized missionary activity and individual conversion, and taught strict adherence to particular religious doctrines.

While sharing some basic elements with the tradition at large, each denomination within the tradition has its own take on Christianity, as do each of the congregations that make up the denomination—subcultures within subcultures. But if a church can be considered Evangelical, it will (1) have more separation (this is relative to Mainline Protestantism, btw) from the dominant culture, (2) emphasize evangelism, and (3) be characterized by strictness (more on this in a later post).

Together, these three characteristics prescribe subcultural separation and internal cohesion while at the same time requiring engagement with the broader culture.³ Nevertheless, as far as marriage is concerned, Evangelicals, like Americans from other religious backgrounds, prefer to engage their own when it comes to marriage. This is both for reasons of social similarity—a shared worldview from being part of the same subculture—and theological priority (which is, of course, not separate from subcultural reasons).

<Tomorrow, more on the theological/social imperative for finding an intra-tradition mate among Evangelicals and how this could play out in one particular church. Today, maybe I should call this Lenten experiment “Dissertating in Real Life” since writing windows keep appearing only after long work days and cranky child and whoa is me. Woe is. Fin.>

1. for example, if the respondent said, “I’m a Presbyterian but I don’t know whether I’m Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) or Presbyterian Church, USA (PCUSA)
2. Steensland, Brian, Jerry Z. Park, Mark D. Regnerus, Lynn D. Robinson, W. Bradford Wilcox, and Robert D. Woodberry. 2000. The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art. Social Forces 79(1): 291-318.
3. This is part of Christian Smith’s argument in American Evangelicalism

Words from my five-year old that strike me as meta-.

As I’m driving with my daughter to her father’s house for ad hoc babysitting <can you call it this when the sitter is one of the parents?> due to what’s proven to be the complete hole in my other childcare options, so that I can attend a post-work <actually still work, but at different hours (?)> dinner, she asks me, “What’s wrong?”

Aware that I’m whining, I can still, evidently, temper the angst only slightly, “Sometimes, I just wish things were a little bit easier.”

“Sometimes things are easy, mom.”

“You’re right. They are. When do you think they are easy?”

“Like when I’m watching a video.”

<alternate additional real ending “…and I don’t know what you’re doing…”>

<addition to the addition ”…and you’re just doing you’re thing.”>

Although, to be fair, there’d probably still be a fair amount of intolerable existential whining in the two-hour narrativized version of my life.

Later on we’re doing some light reading <something about pig, a van, and a tin man> when she shows me her practice prose from the school day. Only two sentences, but plenty of pain:

The van is on the hen. The cat is on the bus.

So you see, even in flash fiction the hen gets a raw deal.

Meta.

Today: Dissertating in Real Life or, How many words can you write during the space provided by your daughter taking a bath?

I made some references on 40 DD No. 2 that I couldn’t cite at the time.  Here are some of those, including at least one correction:

• Women are more religious than men. From The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and The Association of Religion Data Archives: This is true whether you look at items related to belief, affiliation, or behavior in Christian Traditions.
• This is Nick Paumgarten’s article in the New Yorker on online dating and this is his interview on Fresh Air. Note here that I erred in citing the stat on the number of marriages formed from online dating sites. Per the interview, online dating sites are responsible for one in six new marriages in the US not 60% of them <I thought that sounded high…>.

Knowing that there are more women than men in congregations across the US, it’s relevant to ask about the age distribution in these traditions when asking questions that pertain to marriage/relationship markets. Here’s a chart from Pew showing the age distributions (though a chart that does not differentiate men and women in each age category):

This is data from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The chart is a screenshot, and you can get to it from here: http://religions.pewforum.org/portraits.

• And finally <I think this is all of them>, I featured the gender gap within the Evangelical Protestant tradition (more on that later) in an example I gave in 40 DD No. 2. Here’s data from the Baylor Religion Survey (2007) showing demographic trends by religious tradition. According to this, women comprise 56% of Evangelicals, Men 44%. So that’s a 12% gap.

Today’s challenge: it’s 5 o’clock on a Thursday; I’m in a hotel room without internet– Correction: the internet is not free; my roommate openly wants to distract me <Bless her>. I don’t feel like doing this right now. Evidently I’m all-too-quickly invoking my early disclaimer about having to force stilted, ugly sentences out just to get it done. Ah, discipline. Growth.

On yesterday’s episode, I left it at this:

The study I’ve just mentioned examines one subculture [college campuses] with an existing gender gap. I’m looking at another: religion.

First of all, to clarify, “religion” is not a subculture. There are religious subcultures and that’s what I’d intended.¹

College campuses are a good place to study the effects of an imbalanced sex ratio on the marriage market² because they are, to a degree, closed markets³ where there are more women than men.

Education is one social institution where women outnumber men on the ground; religion is another.

Whether you’re looking at religious membership or behavior, women are more likely than men to belong, participate, and believe. If you go to church, you’ve probably noticed this before just by scanning the pews. If you don’t go to church, that women are more religious than men may just strike you as common knowledge or sense. Since similarity of religious worldview is one of the primary social characteristics people use to match up, the gender gap in religiosity presents a particular problem to religious women.

If I’m a pious and eligible bachelorette, my options for finding a compatible pious bachelor are limited in the general and the specific. In the general—like, say, looking at the gender gap for Evangelical Protestants in the US, which is 12-15%⁴, there are fewer of them than there are of me nationwide. In the specific—like, say, at my church—there are fewer of them than there are of me in the very place where I might seek a religious mate.

The latter is the microcosm of a marriage market that I’m interested in. In a particular religious community—a church whose activities and members are tightly knit enough to be considered a subculture in the same way a college is—how does the gender gap affect dating and mating? The research I mentioned yesterday offers a set of expectations for how women (men, too, I guess) behave in and interpret the relationship market when there are more women. But these behaviors (e.g. nonmarital sexual activity) seem less likely to characterize gender-imbalanced relationship markets in a religious context. So how will it differ? How will women (and men and the organization in which the women and men are located) respond?

“Well, what about our global village?” You might ask. “And things like match.com or that new one christianmingles or Christiansingles—the new one for Christians?”

Yes. Internet dating sites have certainly gained in popularity in recent years [cringes at generic sentence]. In fact, sometime last year, Nick Paumgarten did a series in the New Yorker on this and was even on Fresh Air talking about his research <an interesting 15-minute or so listen. I recommend.>.  He said that something like 60% of new relationships are formed through online dating cites.⁵ Theoretically, then, a woman could expand her options by transcending her geography. And evidently many women do.⁶ But that aside, what responses are unique to the religious context?

<And stop. Lesson of the day: half the story is in the footnotes. I’m learning a lot about what I need to define and cite by what I keep backchanneling to myself /yourself there. And writing without the Internet sucks—no instant gratification of finding accurate facts and figures.  Maybe, though, I was less distracted while writing…? Maybe.>

1. Is it necessary to get into all this? I never know. But—Sociology 101–by subculture, I don’t mean cult or commune or closed off group, etc. A subculture refers to a group whose language, norms, values, and symbols distinguish the group from the dominant culture though do not run counter to it (since that would be a counter culture). This is probably a needless footnote.
2. Even as I type that I wonder if I need a new expression here. “Relationship market”? Kate Bollick calls it the romantic market, which I think works. And what about the marriage squeeze? Would “relationship squeeze” or “romantic squeeze” be better? Although the latter sounds like an awkward term of endearment…main squeeze…
3. I know that’s a dangerous term, “closed.” And I’m open to using another, more accurate or appropriate descriptor. What I mean by sorta, kinda closed is that students tend to date other students at their schools. This is partially a matter of opportunity and availability—traditional students on residential campuses spend a lot of their time around other students, so it makes sense that student-student relationship formation would be common.
4. –A figure I’m drawing from memory but can’t cite at the moment due to aforementioned Internet unavailability. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life would have this information, though. And, though, also the estimate of the gap depends on how you define Evangelical (e.g. whether we’re talking about a group of people from certain denominations or a group of people who profess certain beliefs). Pew has its own way; other surveys use other methods of parsing out traditions. In any case, it’s safe to say that, for Evangelical Protestants there are at least 10% more women than men. Another question you might logically ask here (because I’m asking it myself as I type) is where this 10% is age-wise. Women live longer; people also get more religious as they age. So you could see where the extra 10% would be older women. I’ll have to report back to me on that. The 10% is not exclusively 55+ women, but I have no figures from memory here. Nothing close.
5. This seems pretty high, and I hope that I’m citing him correctly as the source for this figure. Will have to verify with return of google…
6. Sidebar that for now. Or rather note it as one possible answer that I’ve introduced prematurely in the narrative.

Say what you will about Nicolas Cage <and with Gems like Con Air, you could say plenty>, but Adaptation is a quality film, brilliant even. In it, Cage’s character is a screenwriter attempting to write the screen adaptation for a nonfiction book. The movie is “about” many things, with one motif being the tyranny of the creative process for the neurotic among us <though, theoretically, staring at a blank page could evoke discomfort regardless of your placement on the neuroticism spectrum>.

So Cage doesn’t know where to begin with the adaptation, doesn’t know where the story actually starts. In the video below, you see him rolling it all the way back to the beginning of time–”How did I get here?” [Flash to images of the embryonic soup of the beginning-of-time oceans and evolution and dinosaurs, etc.]

This, to me, is the quintessential beginning of a writing project. Everything seems related and relevant if you zoom out far enough, so where do you actually begin?¹

It’s possible that–Thank you, Pop Culture–there’s enough buzz related to what I study to prevent a digression into the relationship dynamics of the stone age. (See examples one, two, and three pertaining to changes in the dating and mating market). But who knows what you’ve been reading on the Internet. So let’s pretend we’re in an elevator and I have thirty seconds. <Apparently we’ll also suspend the social norm against talking in elevators.> Better still, how about a radio ad playing in the background while you’re riding the elevator:

Are you a female between the ages of 18 and 35…

Are you pursuing a bachelor’s/master’s/professional/doctoral degree or are you otherwise “literary”… ((Lori Gottlieb’s term for women who like book and judge men on the basis of spelling and grammar in this article.))

Do you have a white-collar job…

Are you financially independent…

In spite of your apparent success in life, do you have trouble finding a mate?

If you’ve answered yes to these questions <particular emphasis on the latter>, then I’m studying you.

The short and sweet of it is this: what happens to dating and mating when there are more women than men?

Even though there may be roughly even numbers of males and females in the US, imbalances occur when you look at the characteristics of each group. For example, do their age structures look the same–are there about as many 20-something males as females? (The census data say, Yes). There are a set of sociodemographic factors like age that pare down the eligibility pools of each gender before people start to filter out potential mates for being snarky or ill-humored or whatever other personality trait. Traditionally, these filters have included:

• Age – She’s the same age or a within a few years younger than he is.
• Education – They have similar educational backgrounds or he has more education.
• Race – They’re the same race/ethnicity.
• Social Class – They both come from the same class background.
• Religion – He and she have a similar religious worldview or tradition.

The pattern you may be noticing is that people tend to choose partners like themselves (homogamy). But there’s a demographic shift underway that seems to be changing the formula: women now (and for a while now) outnumber  men in college enrollment and in degree attainment and in grad school.² That means that, as far as pairing up on the basis of educational attainment, there are “too many women.”

A situation like this in which there are either too many men or women (i.e. an imbalanced sex ratio) is called a marriage squeeze,³, and it has consequences for the way that people date and mate <probably “marry” is really the word there, but it’s hard to resist the cuteness of the rhyme>. These consequences vary according to who’s more numerous–men or women.

In the current educated-woman cultural millieu, we’re witnessing the effects of having a surfeit of a particular sociodemographic type of female relative to its male counterpart–e.g., later age at first marriage (yes, there are a variety of reasons why this is happening) and more nonmarital sex (and also this). In fact, there’s an interesting study of sex ratios on college campuses, those dating and mating microcosms, that finds more sexual activity, less commitment, and less satisfaction ((i.e. lower appraisals of the men on campus, lower appraisals of relationships) on campuses where women outnumber men. And with women’s educational attainment surpassing men’s, it seems that in the imagined marriage market that exists beyond college campuses, these characteristics are also likely to be found.

The study I’ve just mentioned examines one subculture with an existing gender gap. I’m looking at another: religion.

<Phew! that was harder than I thought, where hard = took longer. More tomorrow…>

1. For example, when I intro my dissertation topic to an uninitiated asker, it always seems necessary to start from the thing I was trying to do before and how it evolved into the thing I’m trying to do now. As if that matters. As if the asker cares.
2. Here, the National Center for Education Statistics explains that bachelor’s degree attainment was 8% higher for females than males. Here, the NCES says that the number of females in postbacc programs has exceeded the number of males since 1988. And here, the Population Research Bureau explains, “Women not only represent a majority of young adults enrolled as college undergraduates, but they also are now nearly three-fifths of graduate students.”
3. In fact, there’s a book about this–Guttentag & Secord’s Too Many Women, 1983.

Do you ever think about this re: your teaching: what will my students remember about this class session a week from now? Let’s assume it’s lecture-discussion. Maybe they’re not even taking notes. What will they remember about an hour of their time this time next week?  I sometimes evaluate my experience at conferences in this way.

I spent the early part of last week at the Educause Learning Initiative conference in Austin <insert love letter to Austin> and listened to several enlightening conversations and systemically-minded thinkers. So now, a week later, what do I remember? The memory I’ve returned to each day since is actually a pseudo- memory–it’s one I crafted by merging pieces from two sessions¹, which both had something to say about the difficulty of being a “novice learner.”

And as I think of it now, perhaps I remember pieces from both as one because each asked me to do something, and I’ll now ask of you the same.

Activity 1:

Clap your hands in front of you.

Now rub them together.

Now fold them and place them in your lap.

Which thumb is on top?²

Now interlace your fingers so that the other thumb is on top. How awkward does that feel?

Activity 2:

Using the image below, say aloud the color of the word, ignoring the color that the word spells.

This should be challenging or similarly uncomfortable (you’re experiencing cognitive overload).

I’ve done a mental merge on the memory of these two exercises because they are related categorically. Both mimic the difficulty of learning something for the first time–whether it’s something entirely foreign or learning to approach a subject in a new way. The act is awkward, uncomfortable, cognitively consuming, and only tacklable in short periods (for cognitive overload, apparently 10 minutes at a time).

While the immediate reference is something like, ‘This is what it feels like to be a student coming to the material you teach for the first time, even though you know it like floorplan of your home,’ there’s an additional way to think about this. That is, What is it like for an instructor (or anyone else for that matter) to change? Once you’ve got a general structure in place for the courses you teach, what is it be like to learn something new about “pedagogical effectiveness” <blah, blah, blah jargon> and attempt to delve into that, to implement it? <And if you want to get specific, the speaker from the first session talked about the discomfort of switching your default thumb position as the way that some people feel about technology + education.>

Tomorrow’s Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten Season. Religiosity aside, I’m willing to argue that the exercise of self-discipline in its varied, individualized forms offers a valuable growing experience: 40 days in which to cross your thumbs the other way and read the color, not the word. It’s an opportunity for attentiveness as much as change <or say that the other way around if it makes more sense to you>.

So for the next 40 days³  <this probably isn’t where you thought I was going>, I’m dissertating for Lent. <If I were a motivational speaker, this might have taken a different turn, but alas.> The uncomfortable part is that I’m chronicling the process here–which means being open about ideas as well as obstacles and forcing ugly, stilted sentences onto a page for the sake of the process. In theory, this will chart the forming of the articulatory loop–a thing that happens for PhDs as much as undergrads as much as toddlers.

To be gendered about the affair, sometimes it’s hard to go out in public without wearing makeup⁴, but it’s probably unhealthy to be cosmetically obsessive.⁵ Wish me luck or chastity. Whatever works.

1. One on…? <see what I mean about the week thing?> and the other on learning and neuroscience <link not found>
2. Here are some fun facts about your thumb placement c/o the speaker. If your right thumb is on top, you’re a “sexy person”; left thumb, “sneaky person.” Yes, these are evidently Science’s terms. If you place your thumbs next to each other–about 1 person in every 100 does–you’re a bit sexy, a bit sneaky. Cursory googling of the thumb test returned nothing novel, and any attempts at also including including “sexy” and “sneaky” only returned content that we’ll just call unrelated. So, best of luck determining the broader meaning of those descriptors, though please do share if you know.
3. Save weekends and such since, 1, I have a kid, and 2, I make the rules.
4. I know. But c’mon
5. Erica Speegle, student and friend, this cite’s for you.