Bee Crystal or At Least Try

This is from a friend of mine's blog that is worthy of following. She has a bazillion kids, responsibilities and reasons to go nuts each day yet keeps it all in perspective.

Crystal & Co.: Crystal's Life in Stacks

Bee Thinking:

Matthew 6:25-34

Song of the Hive:

Watch Me Fly

Artist: Dana Parish

Bee-Fuddled

Back when I was in graduate school, upon writing my thesis, I became stuck on a section of statistical analyses that I couldn’t get past.

I knew that I needed to have this particular function to appropriately analyze my results but I just didn’t understand how it worked.

It killed me.
I read.
I studied.
I tried different types of analyses to perform the function I needed.
I made my major advisor crazy.
I made myself crazy.

My Thesis Committee waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Finally, one day, my major advisor had enough and assigned me to work with a doctoral candidate with a subspecialty in statistical analysis for the health sciences.

Finally a breakthrough was near.

I met Captain StatMan on campus in the bowels of the computer lab to go over my area of concern/complete block. He read my thesis, reviewed the format of my data and quickly ascertained that I indeed needed to use the dreaded function that I didn’t understand.

I explained to him this was all well and good but I needed to understand the function, not just use it.

He asked, or rather stated, “Why.”

I tried to counter that to be true to my thesis, I needed to understand every last piece of it to believe in it and defend it to my committee.

He stated, “Why.”

I rambled on about intellectual integrity, life long learning and something about all the dead crickets in the computer lab basement floor (they were very crunchy when stepped upon and the sheer volume of squished dead crickets made the floors slick but that’s another story for another day) and the tragedy of all the dead crickets.

He remained nonplussed with my reply and queried back, “How did you get here today?” I was fairly certain he was trying to see how quickly he could extricate himself from the crazy girl trying to finish The Thesis Fated Never to Be Completed so I quickly shot back “My car, why.”

“How does the carburetor work on your car?”

Now, he should have known not to ask a girl from South Hurst how a carburetor works (yes, this was before fuel injectors) as I explained in painful detail everything except the Bernoulli Principle and fluid dynamics.

He realized he was going to have to try harder.

“Okaaay…does the carburetor work without you knowing HOW it works?”

“Well, duh of course it does what’s the point anyway, I can see you need to get home and thanks for your help and, oh…I see.”

*Blink*

*Blink*

*Sigh*

“I still have to know how the function works to incorporate it into my thesis.”

At this point he said, “Let me show you.” He chicken pecked in my representative data, wrote the code and voilà, after the clatter- whirr- whine- pause- line feed-swish of the dot matrix printer, the results were there in grey, sorta recognizable numbers.

“Too easy.” I said, “It works but I don’t understand how.”

“Not important-just make it work for your thesis and know that it does.”

Long story short, I gave up on my quest shortly thereafter for understanding the “how” of the analysis and trusted that it would indeed work.

Amazingly it did and my Thesis Committee had no interest in the intricacies of the statistical analyses. I graduated and lived happily ever after, or at least, finished my thesis.

Knowing the "how" is great, unless we lose the bigger picture of why we want to know in the first place. It's a lesson I keep re-learning...

Bee Thinking:
Proverbs 3:5-6

Song of the Hive:
Soul Shine
Artist: Beth Hart

Bee Thinking About This...

My Favorite Facebook String of the Week

Status Update:

KL* just Twittered his MySpace Friends that he's updated his Facebook profile that will tell everyone to follow him on Twitter... ....then a freak wormhole opened up in Narcissitic Space. BLOG that!

Comment:

Dude, that post rebooted by iPhone, Blackberry, iMac, PC, MacBook, Android G1, and those little electrode things I use to control my social media seizures. Sad Whale. Bing. Ack.

Reply:

my Blackberry just powered down in dissent, and my remote control is stuck on Lifetime network...doesn't matter, the TV is porting all the close-captioning to Mandarin.Hope Floats, in Chinese, kinda translates to "You're a loser, round-eyes"Gadget Conspiricy, just like Assimov predicted.....

*-Authors are not identified to protect the, well innocent doesn't work here, but maybe intelligent does...

Bee Splotchy

A friend of mine recently commented that I wear a lot of black. I think she was trying to tell me to add some color in a round about way. I went back to my closet to take inventory and indeed she was right. I wear a lot of black.

My clothes just don't start out that way.

There is my favorite Banana tee that was worn so many times that any more bleach or bluing would render it a tattered mess. Just a bit of Rit Dye Black and voilá, the new black Banana tee formerly known as the white Banana tee was born.

There are my best, softest bamboo yoga pants. They are my favorite thing to wear except for my favorite jeans which are older than my first born but that’s not the point. The point is, I LOVE them. Unfortunately, I spilled bleach on their cobweb greyness one day and they then looked tie dyed in all the wrong places and one of the splotches looked like Jesus which I found distracting and well, you get the idea.

Again, Rit Dye Black.

As I looked through my closet I noticed all the clothes that had once been a color other than black. In my mind’s eye I still saw them as their original color but in reality the Rit Dye Black now covered up all the living, blemishes and splotches they once held.

Covering up splotches is what we do. It’s natural. It’s human. And, when it comes to favorite clothes, it’s recessionista chic.

Our lives are very much the same. We look for the Rit Dye Black to cover up all the messes, heartaches, grief, shame and just plain living that we do. This is not a bad thing. It works and we can go on a little less splotchy.

But…
it does make it harder to see our own original color or that of those around us. We often miss the Passion Red or Honorable Purple or True Blue or Sunshine Yellow.

Yep, there’s a lot of Rit Dye Black around and it’s not a bad thing- as long as we remember to see the color too.

Bee Happy With the Chaos

Friday's Five Things to Bee Thankful For or The Keebler Elves, Crown and Crumbs

The Keebler elves must have had a party in my pantry over the weekend. No really. I think they got tired of working, ran away from the hollow tree and landed in my pantry for a rockin' night out. Perhaps they found the Crown stuck in the back, took a few sips and proceeded to just get a little jiggy with it.

Anyway, you should see the elfin aftermath.

So...today's things to be grateful for:

1. I have a pantry.

2. I have a pantry with food.

3. The food, wrappers, crumbs and chaos aren't so bad.

4. The dog will help clean up.

5. A pantry devolved into chaos is a great motivator for a clean, organized pantry.

Now if only I had a little elfin magic.