In the spirit of routines and trying to buck some of the frustration that comes with this season, I am again putting out a series of reflection and planning posts, that started with a list of best* posts of the year. Today is a list of numbers, data that somehow defines my year. Previous installments: 2017, 2016, 2015.
There are any number of numbers that have been used to quantify the experience of 2018, including how much average temperatures rose, stock market tickers, voters suppressed, emails leaked, dollars spent on political advertising, number of people who died in California wildfires, body count from Yemen, total human population on Earth, instances and casualties of mass- and police-shootings—plus happier statistics that aren’t necessarily kept such as weddings, child-births, mitzvoth, or trivialities like cups of coffee, diapers, or speeding tickets. Here are some numbers about my year.
- 5 classes taught
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- 4 courses taught for the first time
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- 1 course repeated from a prior iteration
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- 114 students enrolled in my classes
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- 2 courses scheduled for 2019 (so far)
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- 4 letters of recommendation written
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- 1 committee served on
- 20 jobs applied for
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- 2 interviews
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- 2 interviews set for 2019
- 151.43 hours spent writing or editing academic work (YtD)
- 1 book proposal submitted to a press
- 2 articles published
- 1 book review published
- 2 academic papers presented
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- 1 abstracts accepted for a conference in 2019
- 52 books read (YtD; not counting academic reading)
- 16,889 pages
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- 9 original languages
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- 17 by women
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- 13 nonfiction
- 63 blog posts published (YtD)
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- 37 book reviews
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- 11 posts about teaching
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- 5 posts about politics
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- 1652 visitors
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- 2371 site views
- 20 states visited
- 1 Canadian provinces visited
- 3 ultimate frisbee leagues participated in
- 2 Sourdough starters kept active
- 1255 Tweets sent (YtD)
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- 104.58 Average Tweets per month
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- 340.1K Twitter impressions, per Twitter analytics
As usual, these numbers mean nothing, anything, and everything. There are other metrics, but they are proprietary of NUDEAN-inc, a private analytics organization. A NUDEAN spokesperson is cagey when asked to share the areas of life quantified while keeping the actual numbers secret, leading one to speculate that the data is only being haphazardly recorded. Whether this situation is a product of gross incompetence or because many aspects of human life cannot or should not be quantified is unknown.
Noodlings 