Mel Chua: Hacker. Writer. Researcher. Teacher. Human jumper cable.

Headed to Zambia to meet myself, offline for a while.

It’s taken me a long time to say this simply: I’m afraid of going to Zambia.

I’ve traveled plenty. Distance, culture, language, developing nations, transit marathons, chaos — fine, Adventure Mel can handle that. The professors and audiology/speech students I’m travelling with are good people. We’ll be helping hearing clinics near Lusaka. But I’m stunned how strongly I react to being in the hearing-space, how much I feel myself flashing back to the arrogance (“I’m smart, dammit, and I will make sure that you know it”) and apathy (“that thing I can’t hear isn’t worth my time/effort to listen anyway, so who cares?”) and isolation I associate with… middle school. The time before I went to school with other people who loved math and making-things, the time before I could immerse myself into collaborative work (because I didn’t have collaborators) and actually build connections, make friends. Lonely, angry, furiously pacing young deaf Mel; a space I’ve sworn I never want to go back to.

I am verbose and inarticulate, and know I’m spewing text here; I am still learning how to think and write from within a tide of feelings, learning how that presence gives me strength and richness instead of taking it away. And I wish — well, I wish for so much, but I won’t write that part here.

I finally talked with my parents (I talked with my parents! This is still kind of a new thing! Yay!) about my fear of going to Zambia last night, at dinner. Briefly. How do you unpack 20 years of suppressed and unarticulated anger and frustration (not at them, but at not being able to connect with the world) over tofu and shredded lumpia vegetables and kombu broth and hot tears splattering your jeans as you keep talking, listening, talking, realizing that you’re scared of meeting you out there, afraid of the exhaustion of continuously educating my companions – we need to lipread you, hearing aids hurt, these tests are scary, sometimes this makes you tired and you do not want to be with people — watching myself gear up to be SupaMel again (it’s been a while) because I feel like I might see my 7-year-old self in every kid who walks into the clinic, and I am thinking oh I must protect them because nobody else is going to understand. But that isn’t who I want to be, and that isn’t what I want to do, but then — what do I do, who shall I be? How do I want to be?

Audiologists and speech pathologists know about things, how to do things, what the textbooks say. I’ve lived inside that silence all my life, and squelched that hurt with work and overwork, and now it’s pouring out, and I need everything I’ve got to be here, and be kind, and constantly remind myself I want to walk this world with love — when I feel like lashing out, when I feel like I can barely manage civility unless I shut some parts of me down, let some portions of me walk away. But I’m standing here, dammit. I’m staying. Being present in a world I struggle to connect to, holding that great anger — my tears this week have soaked my pillow, my car, the chapel floor, my mom’s shirt, everything. I find myself going off alone every few hours and just sobbing, and I don’t know why, but at the same time I do.

But this is why I’m going. I am going to meet myself, to learn more about this aspect of my life I’ve always dealt with in a certain way (a lot of fighting, as it turns out). I need to be all me, be all there, and this thundering volcano is the source (I think) of so much… everything — and I think I can stand now at the scorching crater lip and be there and not walk away and see what happens. It’s not that I think I’ll figure everything out before June 2nd when we get back to the States. I don’t have milestones or goals; I just want to be there and let all parts of me be there and not deny my anger but still, somehow, I have no idea how — still stand in love, as weird and corny as that sounds. It’s actually what I want to do; how else do I describe it?

Oh. And I will be of use in the clinic, help people, write papers, all that. I will. But I will not hide in functionality or overwork or anything else. I’m leaving behind all the defenses I can leave behind, because I know that I’ll bury myself in work or writing or books or email if given the chance — so I won’t give myself those chances. And I’ll be kind, especially to myself, because… because. There is a small Mel self that needs a lot of kindness.

Our flight leaves this afternoon. I’m basically offline between now and June. We’ll see what happens, and… I’m looking forward to it. Breathing. Unknotting my stomach. So afraid. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe something will. We’ll see. I’m just going to work on being there — with all that I am… whatever that means.

Oh. And random linkspam, because random Mel still reads things, and it’s still a defense mechanism to distract myself (and others) from conversations and writings like this by waving shiny things around (“and now that we’re done talking about deafness, here are things that are totally more important shiny shiny whee it’s all ok!”): An alumna of my high school explains to her daughter why she works. And NPR’s analysis of college a cappella.

Pray for me, and all of us, if you pray. I don’t know what else there is.

May 17, 2013 – 7:59 am | hearing | 3 Comments »

Black print on thick white paper, serif font.

Originally written a few weeks ago when I was sick. Posting now, because… well, you’ll see my next post in a bit.

English is not my native language. Text is. When I think, there’s a silent voice in my head that doesn’t pronounce the “th” and “s” sounds I can’t hear — but those letters pop out crisply in a mental picture, black print embossing character-by-character on thick white paper, serif font.

I usually forget my mind is working overtime to process speech until I’m sick and the massive machinery starts breaking down in ways I can see. It slips and struggles; my ability to listen and converse becomes a frantic clawing, grasping at a cliff I’m slipping from — and then I plummet and thrash alone in freefall, disconnected. My freezing fingers and sore wrists want to type, because writing is my talking; twice yesterday, I caught my hands reaching for ASL because communicating in a language I barely know (to people who don’t know it at all) felt easier than speaking.

Books taught me language, were my shields, were what I could always trust to be there and hold my hand. Ideas and thinkers worth the effort to understand, flat solid pages that wouldn’t accidentally turn away or place their hands over their mouths while speaking. Much has been made of geek kids finding solace from their solitude in books (or now, the internet). It was even more so, I think, for me.

English is not my native language; written English is. So it was with great triumph and joy that I discovered — recently, this spring — that I am at the point with German where I can understand bilingual tapes. The kind that say an English phrase followed by the German translation. I do not understand the English phrase when I hear it — but then I hear the German, and the complete English sentence pops, in print, into my head, immediately followed by the German one (occasionally with fuzzy words that pop into focus a second later when I’ve puzzled through some grammatical point). The first time this happened, I was startled. Then I started laughing. Then my sense of wonder exploded all through the minivan I was driving and I thought oh, hello, big wide world, I’m a Mel! I will see you and hear you and talk with and connect to you and and and…

It’s hard. But the hard is what makes it good.

May 17, 2013 – 7:46 am | hearing, languages | No Comments »

Spending my 27th birthday at home

I found a watercolor that I did this spring that says: home is where they want to take you in when you come back.

We were driving home on the evening of the 8th when Mom pointed out Evanston Hospital and said they’d gone inside around this time 27 years ago. She and my dad told me the story of my birth: how they didn’t know I was a girl ’till I arrived, the phone calls (Ama had just left Glenview on a roadtrip and didn’t believe Dad until he pointed out he was calling during the most expensive time of day: “if I were joking I would call during the cheap time!”), the hordes of aunts… we pulled out photo albums and they translated the Tagalog/Fookien captions until just past midnight. Pictures of Tiny Mel Self blinking sleepily in the arms of a beaming, exhausted Mom and Dad.

We had a proper (massive) brunch the next morning at Egg Harbor Cafe and walked around the park digesting and discussing gender identity, Eucharistic theology, diversity in engineering… the sorts of conversations I could easily imagine having with friends (I shouldn’t be surprised at this; I had to get my intellectual tendencies from somewhere). I did some research in the afternoon, and we got Long Birthday Noodles (as per Chinese tradition) at a Ramen shop, followed by frozen yogurt and a call from Guama. It was great to be able to update Guama about my cousins; I’ve spent so many years so far outside the loop that this is still a “wait, I am a member of this family!” sign that happily surprises me.

The birthday didn’t stop then; Mom and I drove to Wisconsin the next morning, and along that long drive I got to hear the story of when I got sick, all the strange things that happened then. I found out Mom had made the colored rosary that’s hung from the van’s rearview mirror this semester; a rosary that’s come to mean a lot to me (long story) now means even more knowing my mom made it. Letters and books from friends arrived, and I wrote back to Kei; I swung out to Northwestern’s campus while Colleen and my parents talked, and we introduced her to bubble tea at Joy Yee’s afterwards.

The next day — still birthday festivities! — my cousins took me to dinner downtown — Mark and Megan, Mindy and Micah (Mindy’s boyfriend), Randy (my honorary brother since infancy). We toasted sake and rhubarb cocktails and slurped noodles and crunched on chicken skin but mostly tackled a gigantic pig’s-head platter, meltingly tender (especially the cheek meat), gorgeous mounded with sauerkraut and cauliflower and spicy red sauce on a soft white bun with blood sausage. Mindy and I dissected the skull (she’s going to med school). The waiter came in with a cleaver and a mallet so we could get at the brain. Megan divided up the tongue (the cheek was better). They all took foodie instagrams. Then we flopped in the lounge of Mindy’s dorm and watched The Big Bang Theory while Mark and Micah played pool and Megan and Mindy made a powerpoint and I tried not to fall asleep on the giant beanbag couches. After that, I helped Randy strip down his Thinkpad to replace the laptop’s fan. Then I did fall asleep, and… well, I think that was my birthday. 27 has gently rolled in, and I’m home, and I’m headed out for Zambia-stuff later tonight.

It’s the first time in many, many years that I have spent my birthday in Glenview, or with my family. The first time I’ve celebrated it with my parents (instead of “I guess my parents might be here, but I’m really celebrating with my friends”) unless you count the baby birthdays that I don’t remember. And it’s… nice, this coming home. It’s just… home. Slipping back on a well-worn jacket that’s been in the closet for a while, having it still fit, looking in the mirror and thinking well, you’ve grown — and here you are.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
– T.S. Eliot

Most people know that bit of the poem “Little Gidding.” But a few lines down, we have this too:

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

May 12, 2013 – 8:24 am | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »

Cleaning out notes from Cultural Theories class

At some point in my Cultural Theories class, I stopped taking notes in text-only format. My simplified understanding of premodern, modern, and postmodern thought is as follows (along with remaining notes from the class so I can put the paper versions in the recycling bin already):

Some postmodern-flavored phrases:

• Be productively lost.
• Beautiful awkwardness.
• Stumbling gracefully.
• Wabi-sabi.
• Get comfortable in the uncomfortable.

“Isn’t it strange to think of postmodernism as a ‘progression’ from modernism when postmodernism is all about eschewing progressions?” I asked during this class discussion. “Even its name suggests it!” (Dr. Lather’s answer: Yes. Sit in the paradox, Mel.)

“Critical theory is wary of syntheses and reconciliations,” she said later in that class. “It is born of struggle, and it wants to cause trouble.” — Patti Lather, in-class comment

Regarding categories: We can set big categories in opposition and use them to distribute centralized resources neatly… but with thousands of tiny categories, it’s harder to place them in opposition… and if we have alternative, non-centralized ways to distribute resources, then we don’t need the categories for that purpose any more. (You can see how these notes — from early January 2013 — already had me thinking about how the materials conditions of open source affect the philosophies of their participants.)

May 11, 2013 – 1:48 pm | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »

In which Mel works on lowering (some of) her defenses around “proving” her “worth”

I begin the writing of this blog post stiffly, with defenses up; I’m conscious that they’re up, and want to look at them and see if I can… do something about that.

*deep breath*

I am required, at least once a month, to “update” certain organizations on my “progress” so they’ll continue providing me with “disability services.” (Note the quotes; I’m already speaking defensively.) I understand the “need” to track progress and prevent resource abuse, and I do appreciate my hearing aids and realtime transcription in my classes and want (“but don’t need,” my pride hurriedly adds) to keep them, all else being equal — but it’s not. I got an update request and immediately saw myself snap into BATTLE MODE, choosing to read it as a challenge to prove my “worth” as a  ”return” on their “investment,” rattling off my international travel schedule, the publication status of my book, board appointments, featured speaker invitations, news clippings on awards I’ve won, etc. It’s a destructively competitive framing: if I outperform the majority of people you see as less-broken-than-me, the vision of me-as-broken must be wrong.

It must be wrong. If it were right, I’d somehow be a lesser Mel — and when I was 7, I thought I was. My human worth wasn’t intrinsic; it was earned by constantly generating school/work output. I remember deciding to protect my 7-year-old self from a world I didn’t trust to treat her right. “You’re worth it, little Mel,” I’d whisper. “I’m big now (I was 8), and I will keep that statement true by doing things to justify your worth!”* Say what you will about using anger as a fuel, but I’m pretty sure my joyful, puppy-like wide-eyed wonder wouldn’t have survived without the barricade powered by outrage that something so happy and good as Small Mel Self should be in danger.

As I edit, I realize I’m writing this in the past tense, standing in a present where I do not need that barricade. My automatic reactions are based on beliefs I no longer hold. Everyone, including me, is intrinsically worthwhile; there are no Broken People. So why would I react as if I were scared of being something ontologically impossible?

Habit. Yep. Should stop that now. (Easier said than done — but easier than I used to think it’d be.)

*Christians may recognize echoes of Sola Fide here, albeit from the weirdly primitive perspective of a 2nd-grader who hadn’t yet quite reached Piaget’s formal-operational stage. The Catholic perspective, as I understand it at the moment, is that faith does justify – and that God grants us (through our faith) the grace to do the works which constantly perfect our justification. So we keep on growing — but that doesn’t mean we’re broken. It just means we’re… growing.

(Geez, this took way too long to write and edit. Lemme post it now. *Button!*)

May 7, 2013 – 1:37 pm | hearing | 4 Comments »

Some early drafts of dances in my brain

Writing this partially so I can look back later and see how each of them turned out — I don’t know which ones will fade out and which ones will turn into something and actually get performed. I’ve noticed that I seem to work exclusively on character pieces to songs with lyrics and a strong beat, so someday I may push out of that comfort zone — but right now, I’m happy.

Makers (working title) is something I hope to do for my “Race, Class, and Gender in Engineering Education” class in the fall with a cast entirely composed of female engineers (who may, like me, have no dance background). I want to explore how many female engineers “perform masculinity” in some way, and how exhausting that can be — so the entire cast is dressed in button-ups and ties performing aggressive, mechanical phrases in canon, and individual dancers and small groups intermittently collapse out of that into brief phrases from contact improvisation before dragging themselves back in. If ends up being really good, we’ll try to perform it at the 2014 American Society of Engineering Education conference in May.

The music for this is going to be an exercise in solo classical-style piano arrangement all its own; I’m adapting “Walk Like A Man” into a lilting waltz and “I’ll Make A Man Out Of You” into florid arpeggios and mashing them together and I don’t know what else. The dance is more developed than the music, which I’ll ultimately need someone else to do.

Watching (working title), a lyrical hip-hop solo with a lot of ASL elements, set to Straight No Chaser’s cover of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You.” I wonder if this will end up being the first solo I choreograph and perform; my body fits inside it like a glove. This surprises me. I’ve never performed a signed piece. Au contraire: I’ve stayed far, far away from them lest I get labeled “Mel The Deaf Person” — and the movement vocabulary is unmistakably feminine (and the song is about the male gaze, to boot). But it’s Mel-feminine, and when set to all-male a capella vocals, it somehow works. I need more arm and core strength; there are some shapes here I would like to hold with better lines. But I’m curious to see where this goes.

Coast-to-Coast (working title), a heavily blues-influenced hip-hop piece set to Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings’ cover of “This Land Is Your Land.” I’ve been tinkering on it since October and it keeps changing from a solo to a duet to a trio and back again. I really want to see Onyx (one of my cast members from “In The Stacks”) do this — she has a spunk and attitude that would bring this hilariously to life — so it’s likely to be a duet or trio at XWorks this coming October right before she graduates.

Transmogrification (final title, ’cause it’s awesome) is  a trio inspired by the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes and set to Hall & Oates’ “You Make My Dreams.” It’s got 3 characters — Calvin, Hobbes, and Calvin’s Mom, and the boy and his tiger tumble all around the stage reenacting highlights of the strip (I love love love the Spaceman Spiff section). The running gag is that Hobbes is a lithe, acrobatic character (in contrast to Calvin’s twitchier, more pent-up, combative movements) — but when Calvin’s Mom is onstage, he (probably danced by a “she”) abruptly turns into a prop manipulable by the other dancers. I have no idea how I’m going to cast this.

May 6, 2013 – 11:00 am | kinesthetic | 1 Comment »

Things that remind me of the world I want to live in: airports and nerds and IVoW

Kate Elliott’s (Edit: actually, Naomi Shihab Nye — thanks for the catch, Sumana!) story-poem,  “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal,” about a group of very different people — who barely spoke each other’s languages — bonding, running, laughing, and getting powdered sugar all over everyone while eating cookies in an airport terminal during a flight delay. Yes.

Wil Wheaton’s spontaneous message to a newborn girl on why it’s awesome to be a nerd. I read the text from this giant image version; the video itself is about 4 minutes long.

“[Being a nerd or geek is] not about what you love; it’s about how you love it… the way you love that, and the way you find other people who love it the way you do, is what makes being a nerd awesome. And don’t ever let anyone tell you that the thing that you love is a thing you can’t love… you find the things that you love and you love them the most that you can.”

The women of IVoW have been a blessing for me over the past 9 months of our circle. When we started in September, “woman” was an awkward adjective for me, one I’d use reluctantly to describe my identification with the female gender; now it’s a word I actually feel honest about claiming.

Our last meeting was yesterday; we shared our future plans and dreams and put our arms around each other and sang by candlelight, and talked and read and ate and cheered and sometimes cried. Barbara, Mary, Anne, Rosalie, Jamie, Jillian, Lee, Kathleen, Kristie: I’ll miss padding downstairs at dawn past your quiet tea-sipping reading in the cabin, bolting barefoot into the farm-field grass to run and run my energy into the dew and sunrise, and coming back to eggs and sausage and buttered cinnamon toast and smiles at my restlessness and hunger. How accepting you are of my wildness and youth, never trying to turn me into anything other than myself. How inspiring your lives and work and selves are to me.

I am the youngest in the group, the child raised by wolves* who finally crept back into the village, wary of  the “civilization” process stripping me of my speed — only to find that standing in a women’s space let me run just as swiftly and freely with my packs while granting greater sureness to my strides and giving me a place to rest within. I felt held and rocked by all these women, grateful for the gift of space to grow within. For two days each month, I’ve been able to live and mature within a women’s world in ways I wasn’t able to when I was passing through my adolescence — and slowly, sometimes painfully and often joyfully, I learned. I am still wild and spontaneous and nomadic; still ferocious and bursting and suddenly caught by wonder — but I am also far more able able to be and love and hold and witness, bear and wait in patience, and accept stillness, veils, and silence as powers of their own, tools that can now sit alongside my whirlwind of movement and voice.

*Since leaving home at 14 for a math and science high school, I’ve privately and affectionately used the term “wolfpacks” to describe the teenage boys and young men I hacked alongside. I’ve often felt like Mowgli.

I’m not done, but at least I’ve started. Catching glimpses of that future has changed the way I hack the universe because it’s changed the way I see and listen to and move and claim mysef within that universe.  The world’s just as infinitely big as it was before, but now it’s richer – as if all those soprano harmonics and flutes and violins and chimes have finally burst out into being atop the great basses and tenors that I’ve heard singing forever.

I promised them that I would build a home — and you know how I am about my promises. I found I was already doing that, and learning it by doing. (Marvelous error!) It does take a lifetime to build a life, and I am glad.

May 5, 2013 – 9:12 am | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »

trying to be brave enough again, again, again.

I wrote this in September of last year.

It’s much, much easier to not know what you’ve missed, not know what you are missing, especially if it’s likely that you’ll always, always miss it. But I resolved a long time ago to choose awareness over absence of pain, and while I falter often on that resolution, it’s still something I strive for; the falterings usually happen along the way to picking myself up repeatedly and trying to be brave enough again, again, again.

I am surprised at how much more true it’s become.

May 3, 2013 – 3:38 pm | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »

Dealing with a (mildly feverish) distractomel

I’m frustrated with distractomel, who can’t get her mind to sit still to analyze data and write papers. It’s stretched on for days now, the painful awareness of how fragile my focus is at times. At least I have a good toolbox of repair strategies to deal with my ADHD and the desire for compassion in dealing with myself. The risk and tradeoff is that my work does slip right now, but, but that’s better than my health.

The tip-over this time, I think, was a cough that’s stretched on since two Thursdays ago and brought with it intermittent fever and aching; sleep time shot drastically up, useful-work time went down. I’m taking antibiotics, which leave a bitter taste on my tongue all day; I’m chugging water, apple cider vinegar with honey, massive doses of Vitamin C. Resting. Doing all the right things.

But the right things don’t shore up a weary mind that fuzzes in and out of fever (today: in). The cough’s side effect of drastically reduced lung capacity has also put a crimp on one of my best ADHD-coping strategies; exercise. I can’t run or dance or do anything energetic enough to get my brain to settle down; I usually do that every few hours, and I haven’t done it at all for 2 weeks now. I’m fine when working or talking with others — the external stimulation and direct dialogue focus me — but pair a fever-fuzzed brain with an unsettled one unable to blow off steam, and you don’t have a very useful setup for solo work. And that is, unfortunately, everything I need to do right now.

So I’m writing down the strategies I’m using as a way to (non-physically) blow off frustration and steam, and to remind myself what I am doing right now, and for reference for my future self next time I get distracted like this.

1. Music. Loud. Ingrid Michaelson is blasting right now. Then the Goo Goo Dolls. Pandora. Loud.
2. Algorithmize my work into small chunks. I can mechanically read things and take notes on them, yes. I can then go through those notes and paste them, one reading at a time, into a blank document, typing notes and summaries around them as I go, building up a structure. I can write code for myself to execute, basically.
3. Walk. Pace. Walk. As much and as fast as my tired body and limited, coughing lungs will let me. Lift heavy things. Stretch. Be in my body.
4. Break it up with talking to people, being with people — no guilt; I need those breathing times, those eating times, those friends-and-family times, to nourish different parts of me. I just need to watch not to overindulge.
5. Let myself write what I need to write (like this post) and try to parlay that energy into writing the things I need to write. Be ok with small chunks and little bits of progress. 10 minutes is at least 10 minutes more than what I had before.
6. Be gentle with myself, mentally and physically. Small puppy brain. Don’t beat it up. Be nice to it. It’s good — it’s trying so hard to be good — and that’s the most frustrating thing about distractomel, and about being distractomel; you try and try and try, and you know you’ll always need to do this trying, and that hit-or-miss is sometimes the best you can get.

Okay. I feel a little better now. I can break down these papers: I have a finite set of readings, and for each reading I will do notes, then I will dump those notes into a paper, and then rearrange them — algorithm. Known. Familiar. Trust the process, take the hit.

Oh, distractomel. What will I ever do with you? I’m gonna love you, crazy little thing. You’re me. That’s who I am. Let’s go now and see what we can do.

May 1, 2013 – 5:16 pm | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »

Reactions to a(n incredible) Colbert Report fanfic with alternate-universe deaf Jon Stewart

I don’t generally read fanfic. And typically, slash fanfic based on the Colbert Report would be the last thing I’d be fascinated by. But when my friend Sumana tells me to read something, I read it — and Silent by SailorPtah set off a little aching echo because it was good.

The premise: the friendship of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart in an alternate reality where Jon is deaf and Stephen in the closet. It’s incredibly tame slash that’s barely even slash — not that I have much basis for comparison, but even I could read it. If you don’t want to see the kiss at the end (that’s about it, really) just read the first 3 chapters, skip the 4th, and you’ll have a buddy story.

Things that resonated for me:

• How important it is to be able to communicate with the people you’re close to in a way you’re both fluent in — no interpreters between you — and how much you don’t want to rely on them as interpreters for the rest of the world.
• The intertwining of a friendship that’s also about a shared pursuit of excellence in work.
• Wondering what the world would have looked like if you could hear. The friendships you have and treasure — what would they look like? Would you still have them?
• The intricate difficulties of lipreading and pronunciation and tracking speakers in a group dialogue and only getting aural jokes on a delay, and the role text communications can take when you struggle to rely on sound (here, they become another medium of fluent communication between friends).

The author did an amazing job of creating a world, stepping into it, delving deep into the implications (and not just going for the obvious “this is what happens with deaf people” moments), and mining brilliant jokes from their alternate universe. I think I’m unable to step back from the story in some ways because moments from that alternate universe match up too well with things I’ve actually lived in this one. The note-writing after an argument; the hug in the hospital, Jon’s glimpse of our universe.

I wanted to give a silent nod and acknowledge that these things and this story did touch me and stay with me. That is all. And now I return to my regularly scheduled data analysis. (Yay, end-of-semester workloads.)

April 29, 2013 – 3:37 pm | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »