Last weekend, I went to a housewarming party for a coworker of mine. She moved actually right down the street from her previous address. The house features two bedrooms and a study (I suppose it could also serve as a very small third bedroom). This got me to thinking about the places I've lived, which since the age of four (that is, since the age that I can remember) have been just five places in four states, three one-bedroom apartments, one two-bedroom apartment, and one house. Put it on a bar chart, and where I've lived looks like this:
Or orient it another way, and the chart looks like this:
Either way, it's interesting to see that I've now lived longer in an apartment than in a house. And soon, I'll have lived more of my life outside of California, my birthplace, than in it, though California still trumps all other states in terms of individual time spent.
The gray represents the places where the paint has worn to the second level--that is, the lacquer or whatever it is has pealed off, leaving the bare burgundy beneath. On the roof, what is still lacquered is so worn out, though, that it doesn't shine in the sun, not even after a washing--hence, those parts where the paint has worn off, right after a washing, actually look more shiny. A couple of tiny spots on the doors have gone to the gray base beneath.I plan on keeping the car a while longer, so I'm weighing whether a paint job may actually be worth it, since the mileage isn't so high. I'm not even sure how much a paint job costs, but I figure it's ridiculously expensive. I saw some paint/body work done on a car when I was a teen, and it seemed like an incredible amount of work, such that I wasn't capable of it myself.I notice a lot of other cars with a kind of paint fading that has taken place now. I guess it's to be expected in the South among older cars, especially when you have no garage and park outside day after day after day.
So I decided to give May a full slate of local financial statistics, as I did March and April. Sure, it was an uncharacteristic month in that I spent quite a bit on one-time purchases that were out of the ordinary for me. But one-time purchases do happen, and in any given year, it's thus likely that I might visit a store just the one time. So here is the graph for May:
And here is the map, with sizing of places based on how much I spent at each place:
Golden Pantry and Kroger still manage to eat up a huge chunk of my expenses, but with the bigger purchases at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and the Shoe Department, things actually look a bit more spread out. What's interesting, however, is what happens when I plot this on a three-month pie chart:
Here, Kroger and Golden Pantry return to prominence. It would likely take some huge expense, like a major car repair, to displace them from the position in which they fall over the long haul. As a result, the map below may in fact be a fairly accurate, though somewhat random, reflection of typical spending.
June would feature some new places, like Sumo, a dessert shop on Broad that I tried out with a friend Monday night. Interesting place--the dessert is made from shavings of ice milk or something like that. Supposedly, it is low in calories, though with all the added syrup and toppings and such, I'm not sure it how low in calories it stays. The folks running the place were kind enough to open up just for us, just as they were closing. I've got to think it's pretty tough for small business owners who ply a trade at something like desserts as opposed to groceries (or even electronics), but then, I guess their profit margins are higher to make up for it.
I received a copy of the fall 2010 edition of Southern Indiana Review Thursday. I'd been waiting for the spring issue to show up, thinking that was the one I was in. But apparently, I was in the fall issue--I simply hadn't been sent my contributor copy. So interested readers can check out purchasing a copy here. My contribution, a story, is called "Such Great Misery of Late."
I'd planned to blog on May expenses this week, but because this publication arrived, I figured I'd blog on something language oriented instead. Last week sometime, I was giving thought to how stories start--that is, what their first sentences, or even first words, are. I was wondering if there were any patterns among books that I like. So I did a survey. Each year, I pick out three books I read that year as my favorites, one nonfiction work, one collection of stories, and one novel. My list goes back about fifteen years. Those books become part of my personal library at home. Are there patterns among these favorite books? Do they differ between fiction and nonfiction? Here's what I found . . .
Of the forty-five books surveyed, "The" led six times, for the lead. Next up, at three each, were "It," "I," and "When." "My" and "This" both came in at two. Really, though, these word selections seemed to incidental to do much with--too many ones. So I figured I'd look at the words in another way--by parts of speech. The breakdown goes as follows:
Nonfiction works on my favorites list lead with the given parts of speech in the following distribution:
Fiction broke down somewhat similarly, though with a bit more variety:
So the total breaks down like this:
Note that verbs never lead as the first word in the book in any of my favorite texts, though two gerunds did show up (one in nonfiction, one in fiction). Pronouns (which are split between possessive adjectives and nouns in the charts above) were popular, forging 42 percent of the first words (with relative pronouns making up 21 percent of those, or 9 percent overall). Articles accounted for 16 percent, and proper nouns 13 percent.
I suppose for some of these works we could get into an argument over what the first word of the book is. Sometimes, there's a preface. Should I count that? An epigraph? A chapter title? I counted none of these. Basically, I went with the first word of the text proper.
Then I got curious as to how my own writing would stack up. So here's a chart with a breakdown of the parts of speech in my thirteen published stories. Among those stories, two each start with "The," "At," and "That." Parts of speech run as follows:
On my list, pronouns forge 38 percent of the first words, which isn't far from the percent among my favorite books. Articles accounted for 15 percent, again close, and proper nouns for 15 percent as well. I guess the one pattern I do see is that while my work mimics the percentages on the overall list, it mimics the fiction even more closely than it does the nonfiction, which tends to start with prepositions less frequently.
So what does all this indicate? I'm not sure. It could mean that my own writing generally mimics those works that I like; it could mean that works I like tend to conform to my own writing. Or it could just mean that among the English language in general, the parts of speech that lead off a sentence fall into a pattern close to what I've outlined in my favorite works and in my own work. I suspect it's probably the latter. But the only way to find out would be to do a much more exhaustive survey of works published in English. Anyone interested in taking up that survey? I know I'd be interested in reading it, but if you think I'm too lazy to conduct the survey myself, you're right. In fact, I just realized that I have fourteen published stories--that other story starts with a preposition. Alas, I'm not going back to redo the chart.
