enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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Missing a companion tonight.

Horrific, embarrassing confession: It's Friday night and I am sitting here alone and I am missing the guy.

I know, I know, I am supposed to be over him! But I simply don't get over people so easily, when I've ventured to give them my rarely bestowed affection and trust.

And of course it is, too, Friday night and I am sitting here alone.

Not to worry. I did not need to be alone. I have, in truth, declined not one, not two, not three, but four offers to do joint activities this weekend. I just wasn't up for them, energy-wise-- I gave a great deal of my energy away to other people this week and I have not enough to spare on friend activities. That and I know that next weekend will be busy and tiring.

I have to have my hair done tomorrow, anyhow. Let's hope that I won't have to walk around the office in a severe bun again next week. :) And I really do look dreadful with a crew cut.

I don't know what is up with me. I suppose it's just that I'm at a place in life at which I'm ready to be in a one-on-one relationship. Most of the time I'm perfectly happy to be alone, and I love, love, love my friends. I feel good about my relationships--new and old--and I feel good about who I am at the moment. I'm also relatively happy with the direction in which I am heading.

The loneliness sometimes creeps in, however, and I suppose all I need conclude is that I am human. I felt something for someone that wasn't honoured, or even reasonable, given what I knew about him. I leapt without thinking. Or, rather, I leapt whilst ignoring my thinking. And now I must pay the price for my folly. Every now and again.

So I wrote something slightly more enlightening when I arrived at the office this morning:

OK, so another morning writing project. I seriously am not a morning person. It seems that my engine doesn�t want to rev before 10. Or maybe 11.

I�m exhausted today. I probably ran too late, although not far. I don�t think my sleep was optimal. I feel as though I have been dragged under a train for a stretch. At least I imagine that this is what that would feel like.

I know I had something to say�I thought of it on my bike on the way to work this morning, mad yellow and cream scarf floating behind me as I coasted hands-free down the hill, feeling a little bit like Isadora Duncan�but it has clean slipped my mind.

You know, I just looked in my little compact and I think I am going to miss being greeted by my scary golden-orange coiff. Looking badly when no matter what you do you cannot improve your appearance one whit is rather character building. :)

So one thing that I was thinking about this morning was this piece that I heard on the radio as I was awakening.

It was on the local morning show of the CBC, so don�t get too excited.

The piece in question was a piece about a stay-at-home mom who decided to run a little experiment by leaving a wallet on the counter at the local Bridgehead (fair trade coffee shop, for the uninitiated). The joints are pretty swanky, which makes the experiment both dumb and intriguing at the same time. The goal of the experiment, in case it isn�t obvious, was to see if anyone would take the wallet. She set it up rather strangely though. First, she put money in it. Second, she put a letter in it explaining her trust experiment. Third, she put sticky notes on it or in it in a couple of places, to tell the individual picking it up to look in the money compartment for the letter.

All of her actions, of course, make it not an experiment at all, but rather a whimsical action. The thing is that the wallet didn�t even last until the third day. And there was only $10 in it (though in fairness in the letter she invited others to increase the pot�that would eventually be donated to the children�s hospital). I suspect that someone stole it out of annoyance or principal, because someone buying a $3 coffee or a $5 latte is not in need of the $10�or the 49 cent Salvation Army wallet.

So the thing is that I wanted to write into CBC this morning to tell them�and I�m too slothful and apathetic to do this�that there was an excellent piece in the NYT a couple of years ago about a much better experiment that was conducted to test this sort of thing. If I didn�t have to pay I would pull it from the archives; you will have to trust my weak memory on this sort of thing.

So the �experiment� of which I am speaking was an absolutely excellent experiment. And it just so happened that it was undertaken by a retired economist. The guy had set up a business to deliver bagels and other related breakfast foods and condiments, to businesses for their morning break. He would drive around and drop off orders of combinations of food, and would leave a jar or box or something in which people were supposed to drop the required payment. The beauty of this project is that he had a pretty large and diverse sample of data, since he was operating this business all over New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, I believe. At any rate, there were a good many participating businesses, of different commercial stripes and sizes. And because he was an anal retentive economist, he kept immaculate records. (Honestly, I start to tingle when I think of operating a project like this, since data�though not the analytical work once I have the data, honestly�which explains the demise of my Ph.D. in part, though I digress�makes me high.)

So the long and the short of it is that this guy found that quite a bit of regularity in the data. (And did I happen to mention that he collected data over a good number of years so he had that nice temporal extension to the data as well? J) Anyhow. I could be wrong re. the conclusion but I�m pretty sure that the result was that people were honest about 78% of the time. I think the payment boxes were picked up once a week or something, so if someone forgot or didn�t have enough money on a particular day they definitely had the opportunity to pay later.

I should write to the CBC and tell them about this particular article, since, really, the wallet experiment was silly.

Well, I just had a break in thought because a colleague came to ask me about retirement ages and behaviour in Canada. This makes me think that I should likely return to the work for which I am paid. My juices are flowing now though, so that is helpful. I�m writing about chronic low income among immigrants, and the intergenerational earnings mobility of the children of immigrants today, so not uninteresting stuff. Did I also mention that I found an interesting result yesterday regarding children�s activities? I�ve been trying to look at dimensions of the observed differences in educational, health, behavioural, social, etc. outcomes of boys and girls as they come of age in Canada. There�s this gigantic myth that boys are out there doing sports and girls are much less active and engaged. I�m managing to debunk this with the data that I have, and the figures are rather interesting when I look at combinations of activities done with any regularity. There�s more to it than that, of course, but that will do for now. :)

7:56 p.m. - 2007-03-30

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