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, and continued with a series of lists. Today is a list of numbers, data that somehow defines my year.
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There are any number of numbers that have been used to quantify the experience of 2019, including how much average temperatures rose, fires in Brazil and Africa, stock market tickers, shady phone calls, dollars spent on political advertising and for national defense, body counts 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.
- 7 – classes taught (across 2 semesters)
- 5 – classes taught for the first time
- 2 – self-paced online classes for which I was the instructor of record
- 162 – students (excluding the online classes)
- 5 – courses scheduled so far for 2020
- 2 – letters of recommendation written
- 16 – Job applications
- 2 – interviews
- 1 – interviews scheduled for 2020
- 2 – campus interviews
- 111.5 – Hours spent writing or editing academic work (YtD)
- 1 – papers delivered
- 1 – book reviews written
- 0 – articles published
- 2 – article-length pieces drafted
- 52 – Books Read (YtD; not counting academic reading)
- 17,462 – total pages
- 342.39 – average pages per book
- 21 – non-fiction books
- 19 – books by women
- 6 – books by African or African-American authors
- 5 – Original languages
- 2 – Graphic novels
- 60 – Blog Posts (YtD)
- 48,853 – words written
- 814 – average words per post
- 34 – book reviews
- 3008 – site visitors
- 3975 – site views
- 8 – states visited
- 2505 – Tweets (YtD)
- 208.75 – average Tweets per month
- 977,800 – Twitter impressions, per Twitter analytics
- 173.8 – miles run
- 1 – video game system purchased
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.
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Noodlings 
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