Life Throws me Through a Loop

Dear Daren,

Am I gullible or what?  "Hey, Erin, I need you to walk in that room."  Why was I so willing, so blindly willing to follow your suggestion?  The moment I walked in, I was met with three men who looked at me expectantly, "Are you our violinist?"  Ummm... It's a good thing I need an excuse to pick up playing again.

Love,
Me


Dear VfL Wolfsburg,

You now allow me to vote for man of the match?  You do realize that I can only watch matchcasts and listen to the radio broadcast in a language I don't understand, right?  And thus it's a rare day when I know who actually had a stellar day.  I'm afraid that all too quickly this could turn into the poll ESPN attempted last year regarding favorite World Cup song --  Super Junior won by a landslide thanks to adoring fangirls (seriously, how is 90+% even a fair poll?).

Love,
Me

P.S. How did Hosogai Hajime from the opposite team end up in every single picture from the game?  I know he's awesome, but really?


Dear Life,

We all know dances make me nervous, especially those slow songs when no one asks me to dance.  For perhaps the first time in my life, I had the courage to ask that handsome man to dance and found out that he spoke Chinese.  My efforts seemed to be further rewarded by him asking for my phone number and introducing me to his other Chinese-speaking friend.  When I got a text that night from him that night I was elated.  My friends and I rejoiced in my courage and my good fortune...except that text message was not from him after all but the new neighbor in my apartment complex.  Figures.  It was too perfect to be real.  Thanks for the fantasy anyway.

Love,
Me


Dear Self,

You didn't go to your sister's for Thanksgiving so you could work on your paper.  You also hoped that you could get your sleep and not get sick from your niece AGAIN.  Except you still can't sleep and now you're sick.  How is that fair?

Love,
Me


Dear Kato,

You're looking ragged these days.  People tell me I look the same.  We make quite the pair, don't we?  Let's survive graduate school, ok?  You're still 'mein liebling auto'.

Love,
Me


Dear 中文,

Did you know that the other day, at 2 am, I realized that I spoke Mandarin?  I know, it shouldn't be a new revelation but it was.  There is nothing in my life that says I should speak this very foreign language - it has been 7.5 years since the mission, I don't take lessons and I don't have many people to speak with even for the most basic of greetings and phrases.  And yet, there I was, completely exhausted, looking for a book on my bookshelf and muttering about it in Mandarin.  I love that you're still in my life.  I hope that you always will be.

Love,
Me

Why I'm not a Stats Person

It's no surprise that I like numbers.  As an engineer I get my fair share of them and the one time I thought I was in the wrong field and spent an hour (an interminably long hour) trying out a different major, I spent the entire time making up math problems.  Note: This is not to say that I am a math whiz.

It's also no surprise that I want to turn everything into a scientific study.  For instance, a few years ago, one roommate and I had the brilliant plan of surveying everyone in our ward to determine if the perception that no one was dating was true or not.  We came up with a list of about 100 questions that were intended to help us understand the perceptions and perspective of 'dating' among our peers.

The sad thing about all of this though is that I always get stuck on the statistics.  How can I make sure my studies are sound?  If I survey people, how do I know that the willing respondents are a good representative of the whole?  There are always so many factors behind who responds and why.  Can I trust the resulting data?

Now we will start in my story:

In January, during the Asian Cup, I carefully kept track of all the games that my Samurai Blues played and dutifully watched the matchcasts.  However, matchcasts are nothing like watching actually games.  You stare at your computer screen and wait for one line or two every few minutes that says things such as, "Shinji Okazaki attempts a goal but it hits the cross bar."  or "Makoto Hasebe suffers a foul."  You read it, and then keep waiting.  I would examine as many of the statistics as they gave me to sort of determine how possession was playing out, how each player was performing but honestly, those don't give you the best picture.  (Especially if you are an amateur at soccer spectating)  Most of that waiting then was just nervous anticipation; I had no idea how things were going to go.

As a result, I would do other soccer-related things to occupy myself.  One of those was to start taking down personal statistics of the players themselves.  I would look up each player on the team and read their Wikipedia article and then search to see if any of them wrote blogs.

I started to notice that a lot of players were married.  In fact, I was pretty curious because it seemed every soccer player around my age was married.  For some reason, that struck me as odd.  So my nerd brain started working and I started a spreadsheet detailing the marital status of the players and the number of kids they had.  I ordered them according to birth year and alphabetically within the birth year.  And despite the fact that this is perhaps one of the weirdest whims of my love for Japanese soccer, I keep it updated with the current active team.

All of these men are married except one.  Can you guess which is not?
Image from Fifa.com

So, I have this data about the "representative" team for Japanese soccer which I pretend is a statistically good representation of the soccer community in Japan overall.  I started to think I really understood how Japanese players worked and decided that they were not quite like the average Japanese person.  For instance, the average marrying age for a man in Japan is 29.6 years old.  So, how did we have a Takashi Usami who was married (and playing for Bayern Munich) at the young age of 19?  How did we have a team with an average age of 25 that was half married and half single?  Especially since only 2 of these people were at the average age of marriage?

Usami and his wife landing in Germany

I thought I had it all figured out.  Japanese men wait to get married because they want to be settled in a career before marriage which usually occurs only after college and other such training.  However, soccer players are often getting employed almost right out of high school and thus establishing themselves in a career and getting financially stable earlier which gives them leave to marry at a younger age.

I was so excited to prove my theory with statistics and numbers.  So I did a few calculations, make a few pie charts to support my theory.  It was all going splendidly until I searched for the standard deviation for the marrying age of Japanese men.  5.3 years.  Which means that those 24 year old married men on the team aren't oddities but are within the bounds of "average" and normal.  Even a 19 year old Usami is within reason.  Now a 13.7 year old married Japanese soccer player might turn some heads but frankly, any 13.7 year old married person would.

Image from Wikipedia.

Silly statistics.  Silly me.

Discernment

A few Christmases ago, I brought home a book to share with a sister: Howl's Moving Castle.  This sister had recently been into the movie because it was dubbed in English by Christian Bale.  Another sister picked it up with some interest, read it, and summed it up as, "It's dumb.  Nothing happens.  What is even the point of it?"  I couldn't really answer her question or explain even why I was drawn to it.  But I loved it and still do.

I picked up that book again recently.  Howl's enigmatic character in this and subsequent books always keeps me coming back for another read.  This time I thought about my sister's comments and wondered, "What really is the point of this book?"

I've decided it is this:  You are looking at a magical world where you don't quite know all the ins and outs as related by a person who equally doesn't know the ins and outs but thinks she does.

For one, she constantly underestimates Howl as a wizard.  She never seems to think of magic as his profession.  Ripped suit?  "How would Howl ever learn to mend it without me?"  Except, one minor detail - He's a wizard and can magically fix it.  Dirty Room?  "I'll just wait until Howl leaves for the day and then clean his room"  Except, again - He's a wizard and can show up again any time he so chooses.  Spell on Sophie?  "He'll never figure it out."  Except, you get the picture - HE'S A WIZARD; he can recognize magic from twenty leagues away.

Likewise, she underestimates his intentions and his personality.  She comes into it thinking that he's a ladykiller (eats girls' hearts), a "slitherer-outer" (avoids commitment), and does nothing but gallivant around the countryside (lazy).  How much of this is really true?  It's hard to gauge.  Countless women and mothers and aunts have shown up at his moving castle angry for leading innocent girls on.  Yet, Howl also spends one scene crying because he fears that from one bad decision, he will be barred from ever loving.  He keeps multiple aliases so that it's harder to be pinned down and he even sends Sophie to the king as his aged mother to blacken his name so that he won't be named the king's decreed Magician.  However, the result of all of this is only that he serves three times the amount of people but the book relates several accounts of his aiding the king in the past.  He makes a big show about what he's NOT accomplishing.  However, in the process, he looks for Prince Justin and Wizard Suliman, resolves Sophie's old age aches and pains, works on countless spells, attends a funeral, fights the Witch of the Waste, and puts a lot of effort and thought into helping everyone else's problems around him.  It's hard to just write it all of as untrue but likewise hard to claim that it is definitively true.

It's a fascinating game I play every time, trying to draw closer to the truth and understand what really is going on.

It's like life.  Every day, I hear the stories of people.  It's a hard game to figure out what is true and what is perceived truth.  It's equally hard to take off my own lens and biases to understand the heart of the matter.  I wish I were better at it.

I rather feel like Sophie - getting it completely wrong.

T Minus...

Dear Research,

You're enjoying this, aren't you?  It kind of amazes me how many different systems engineers have to learn to think in.  It's not enough to just have a pressure; there's total pressure, static pressure and freestream pressure to confuse a gal.  We're not even discussing how 3 km/s as a freestream velocity without any other parameters is practically useless - don't you know that sonic conditions are conditional to isentropic conditions?  The more I look at this problem, the more I just want to write: "My research hasn't been done before; you're just going to have to believe me on this one."  As it is, these late night/early morning writing sessions are starting to wear me out.    

Love,

Me

Just found this song.  Although I don't have anyone to sing this song too, I think it's cute and applies to my life at this very moment.

Faffing About

Last night, I had a dream about marriage.  I've had a number of dreams about marriage in the past 5 years and they never fail to entertain.  This one was equally interesting so I will share it here.

In this dream, I suddenly found myself in this very fluffy white lacy wedding dress.  You know the dress from My Big Fat Greek Wedding?  Yep, I think I was in that dress.  There was too much fluff and too much lace for my taste.  So, I'm sitting there in this slightly gregarious wedding dress, waiting very nervously for my groom, who is running late.  I'm nervous because I don't actually know who my groom is or what he looks like.  Someone comes up to me and says, "You need to fill out your marriage certificate."  I'm handed a form with lots of blanks.

I look over it and see the usual, expected information: Name, birthdate, birth place and parents for both the bride and groom.  I skip over the parts that I know - the information about me and my family - and immediately look at the big blank in the middle of the form where my future husband's name goes.  In a slight panic, I look up.

"I don't know my husband's name."

Someone pipes up.  (There are no faces in my dream, just voices and hands)  "Sure you do."

Me: <gulp> "Really?  I can't seem to remember it right now.  Could you remind me?"  (This is where my nervousness turns to panic because I'm wracking my brain for any sign that there is a man in my life and coming up absolutely blank)

Someone else laughs at me, "You don't remember your own groom's name?"

There I am, staring at this blank form while these girl voices all titter and giggle as though I'm pulling their leg with some clever joke.

Finally, someone takes pity on me and laughingly says, "Silly girl.  His name is Jacob."

I look up from the form with shock.  "Jacob?!  I would never marry a Jacob.  My brother's name is Jacob."  (This is true to a point.  I've never thought I would marry someone who has my brother's name, not because I'm prejudiced against Jacobs but because I don't want my brother Jacob to feel like second-place.  He's first place as far as Jacobs go.  I've kind of always felt this way.  It turns out one of my sisters feels the same way.)

The girls laugh.  "Well, his name is Jacob but you call him Jake."

I relent a little.  My brother HATES being called Jake.  I could be ok with marrying a Jake and leaving Jacob for my brother.  "Really?  I'm marrying a Jake?"

I look down at the form and see the name "JACOB" has been written on the form.  I start tracing back over the letters.  J A C O

I wake up.

Aren't people supposed to wake up before they find out the name of the person they are going to marry?

Weird dream, no?

Discoteca

It's no secret that my sisters and I try to influence our niece with our preferences in music.  Ever since the  very first time I held Alexis in my arms, I've been singing to her.  Most of that has been Asian music since that is what I listen to.  When I try to distract her on my sister's cell phone during long car rides, it's Asian music videos that I pull up.  Likewise, other siblings have tried similar approaches.  In her short little life, she's heard music in English, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and French.  

To my excitement, The Niece fangirls over Korean pop boyband B2ST.  Seriously, the first time I showed her Bad Girl she went crazy in a way that shocked even her mother.  Here is a clip my sister caught of the little one rocking out and creating her own choreography to B2ST's Fiction.  One year old and already such a sense of rhythm.  I would like to claim that I have half of those genes.  

Last weekend, I got a glimpse of the flavor of music that my niece chooses for herself.  Whenever I put on a music video, my niece would toddle over to the clock radio near the bed and turn it on.  Then she would sit back and dance to it with consistent, rhythmically accurate choreography.  The music?  Latin.

"Really, Baby?  This is the music you like?"  She laughed.

I turned it off.  A few minutes later, she went back and turned it back on.  We stopped and stared.

Soon enough, our conversation moved to other things but every so often, during those lulls, we would remember that that music was still playing and the niece was off-and-on dancing to it.  (Babies are easily distracted creatures)  Her mother would ask, "That music is still playing?"  I teased, "Baby, your mother wants you to turn your music off.  Go shut it off."  Alexis would just laugh and dance away from my reach.  We'd forget about the music as the conversation took off again and then at the next lull, that situation would replay.

I would tease Alexis about listening to music she can't understand but I guess her aunts have done a pretty good job at setting that precedent.

(In all truth, right now, my niece is really just obsessed with buttons.  She also figured out how to turn the hotel phone onto speakerphone and would have dialed China if we had given her the chance)

Whate'er Thou Art, Act Well Thy Part

My dad called me the other day to tell me that the Astronaut Program at NASA is hiring.  They don't require PhD's any more, just a Bachelor's plus three years experience.  I just have a Bachelor's and 5 years in a PhD program.  1 PhD degree = 3 years experience.  So, it looks like either way, I'd need that ever elusive degree.

When I was younger, I often wondered if I could be an astronaut.  I love space.  I mean, I really LOVE space.  It's one of those un-explainable love affairs I have.  I can't get it out of my system.  Exhibit A: I cry every time I listen to the transmission of the Moon Landing.  Exhibit B: My favorite Smithsonian Museum is the Air and Space Museum.  Exhibit C:  This line from October Sky never fails to elicit a huge smile from me: "What do you want to know about rockets?"  "Everything."  Exhibit D: I am studying reaction control system jets on the mars entry vehicles for my PhD.  I could go on all day.  I'll stop there; Exhibit D is probably proof enough.  

When I got my dad's call, I immediately started looking for the application materials.  I haven't ever really wanted to be an astronaut before - I long ago decided that facing eternity through the expanse of space might terrify me.  I also wondered how I would manage knowing that everyone and everything that I loved was far away on the tiny little orb that is Earth.  

However, suddenly, I'm contemplating being an astronaut as though it's a real option.  In many ways, it's not ideal.  Astronauts under rigorous training that is meant to test their emotional, physical and mental limits.  The hours preparing for and on a mission mean for long periods of time, you are largely absent from family and loved ones.  It's a high-risk job.  During the Challenger investigations, famed physicist Richard Feynman likened launches as Russian roulette.  Especially with budget cuts in NASA, and the era of "faster, cheaper, better" which defies logic and requires NASA to rely heavily on out-dated technologies to complete current Mars missions, the safety of space travel is still a concern.  (This is not meant as a negative reflection on NASA - the people that I have met at NASA impress me time and time again with their intelligence and their warm-heartedness and humor.  These are people who are working here not because of impressive paychecks - it is only government pay after all - but because they truly love space as much or more than I do.)  All of this is not even including the rigors of a space mission itself which requires technical know-how to fly the vehicle, perform maintenance, perform scientific experiments while eating space food and having your muscles atrophy in the low-gravity conditions. 

Could/Should this be me?

Despite all of these negatives, it's a temptation.  Do I dare?  Do I try for it?  

Applications are due by January 27, 2012 and transcripts aren't required until July 2012 (which gives me until then to get that pesky PhD).

Now if only I could push that thought out of my head long enough to focus on the task at hand: proposal writing.