I’ve put up plywood on the inside of the windows and braced the main door. They will break out the glass, but the new wood will hold. I will listen to them scratching against it, then I might fall asleep in the middle of the floor wrapped in the rug we took in as a last minute wedding gift.
I have to remember: these are actual examples, the representative samples, the collected set of typical outcomes. These are what I became an accountant to manage. Oh, they may be howling and circling the house now. They may be shaking out the pants legs of their mediocrity at the moment; but, come morning, I will have them in columns and rows, in tabular sums. The pumpkin-hollow faces of everyone’s 1.7 children will be squeezed again into a ledger, made to ride without complaint a normalized curve.
It does not matter where any graph line is going. It only matters that the majority of the points fall on that line. Drive the standard deviation down to zero is what I say. Explain errant points as testing bias. Have a good enough conclusion, and the data will conform.
I’ve gotten to where I can recognize by sound and fury alone some of the typical subjects, can occasionally identify some random sample individually. Most fade into white noise, but a few would have to stand out to make this collection representative.
As predicted, my wife cannot take it. She places a hand over each ear, bends forward as though to roll up into a pliant protective ball. She emits something too weak to be a scream: perhaps air leaking from her scrunched lungs unannounced, or a blockage in the larynx where the work of belief is simply too much to get uniformly past. All these jostled data points surrounding the house, prying at any crack in our domestic armor, drives her into a pointless stammer of raw existentialism. She has been hiding upstairs in the master closet for most of the night, filling the statistically predicted position of the subject who cannot cope. She will return to the closet, instinctively believing small spaces are safer, unaware that small spaces and samples gives you no insight into how the whole of anything will, by cookie-cutter, turn out.
She cannot stay indefinitely in the closet. In the excitement of this temporary chaos of statistical input, she has forgotten that tonight is the eighth consecutive night since she and I last accomplished sex, given my one mathematically established failed pseudorandom attempt during our physical relations drought. Today is my day to be successful, with a 103 second performance that at least I will find satisfying.
I will coax her out by explaining that all averages are ineffectual, and that in the morning we will find our data subjects waiting in their accustomed lines and rows, equally spaced, happy to be back in their predicted places. What else would they do? They are data points, samples: a random, manageable collection drawn from the great anonymous mass that none of us wants to deal with. Yes, every so often they get muddled, set themselves against the hobgoblin machinery that gives them definition. They rise against those of us who, by collecting the trivial information of their cluttered lives, and ordering their insignificance into trends, give them a locatable place in our world. But such revolt as this against our predictions cannot last long. Their lives are nothing but trends, elements of normalization, choices of no choice: merely the stuttering latch-key that unlocks the next batch of data points.
I will have spreadsheets for them all. I will welcome them into my analysis programs. They have always been comfortable there. These stray, disorderly blips on the graph occur only rarely, and in the morning not even they will remember their disquiet. By the creaking hinge of dawn they will all be whipped into a statistical mean that nearly hums of the ordinary, chuckles of the expected.
My wife will be talked out of the closet inch by inch, her face as taut as mooring lines in a flood. She will come out to me, wincing at the scratching and thumping coming from outside, the ineffectual noise of the assault by this horde of data points raging against our properly rated and tested reinforcements. She will realize that this is the night where, statistically, in any marriage, I toss her across the bed and ensure she is simply the object of my carnal ferocity. I have taught her the averages of this: she understands the numbers; she understands her part in the repeating equation.
If my back holds out, she will sleep late into morning. The morning will be a bit of crisp, empty air, with a smattering of dampness: and the data points will be quiet again, stretched out across the multi-use land like rolls of hay, or sheared corn stalks waiting the wonder of an economically viable cellulosic ethanol trade. Breakfast, with everything back to form, will be scrambled eggs and a roll left over from Thursday’s dinner. She will not speak until I have had too much butter. I will see the idle love in her eyes that is common to our age, and we will small talk our glorious way into the daily typical. I am a lucky man in these things: a very, very lucky man. Just like every other man. Just like the collection of many experiences colors me to be. Just like anyone who can see the odds coming.
I have to remember: these are actual examples, the representative samples, the collected set of typical outcomes. These are what I became an accountant to manage. Oh, they may be howling and circling the house now. They may be shaking out the pants legs of their mediocrity at the moment; but, come morning, I will have them in columns and rows, in tabular sums. The pumpkin-hollow faces of everyone’s 1.7 children will be squeezed again into a ledger, made to ride without complaint a normalized curve.
It does not matter where any graph line is going. It only matters that the majority of the points fall on that line. Drive the standard deviation down to zero is what I say. Explain errant points as testing bias. Have a good enough conclusion, and the data will conform.
I’ve gotten to where I can recognize by sound and fury alone some of the typical subjects, can occasionally identify some random sample individually. Most fade into white noise, but a few would have to stand out to make this collection representative.
As predicted, my wife cannot take it. She places a hand over each ear, bends forward as though to roll up into a pliant protective ball. She emits something too weak to be a scream: perhaps air leaking from her scrunched lungs unannounced, or a blockage in the larynx where the work of belief is simply too much to get uniformly past. All these jostled data points surrounding the house, prying at any crack in our domestic armor, drives her into a pointless stammer of raw existentialism. She has been hiding upstairs in the master closet for most of the night, filling the statistically predicted position of the subject who cannot cope. She will return to the closet, instinctively believing small spaces are safer, unaware that small spaces and samples gives you no insight into how the whole of anything will, by cookie-cutter, turn out.
She cannot stay indefinitely in the closet. In the excitement of this temporary chaos of statistical input, she has forgotten that tonight is the eighth consecutive night since she and I last accomplished sex, given my one mathematically established failed pseudorandom attempt during our physical relations drought. Today is my day to be successful, with a 103 second performance that at least I will find satisfying.
I will coax her out by explaining that all averages are ineffectual, and that in the morning we will find our data subjects waiting in their accustomed lines and rows, equally spaced, happy to be back in their predicted places. What else would they do? They are data points, samples: a random, manageable collection drawn from the great anonymous mass that none of us wants to deal with. Yes, every so often they get muddled, set themselves against the hobgoblin machinery that gives them definition. They rise against those of us who, by collecting the trivial information of their cluttered lives, and ordering their insignificance into trends, give them a locatable place in our world. But such revolt as this against our predictions cannot last long. Their lives are nothing but trends, elements of normalization, choices of no choice: merely the stuttering latch-key that unlocks the next batch of data points.
I will have spreadsheets for them all. I will welcome them into my analysis programs. They have always been comfortable there. These stray, disorderly blips on the graph occur only rarely, and in the morning not even they will remember their disquiet. By the creaking hinge of dawn they will all be whipped into a statistical mean that nearly hums of the ordinary, chuckles of the expected.
My wife will be talked out of the closet inch by inch, her face as taut as mooring lines in a flood. She will come out to me, wincing at the scratching and thumping coming from outside, the ineffectual noise of the assault by this horde of data points raging against our properly rated and tested reinforcements. She will realize that this is the night where, statistically, in any marriage, I toss her across the bed and ensure she is simply the object of my carnal ferocity. I have taught her the averages of this: she understands the numbers; she understands her part in the repeating equation.
If my back holds out, she will sleep late into morning. The morning will be a bit of crisp, empty air, with a smattering of dampness: and the data points will be quiet again, stretched out across the multi-use land like rolls of hay, or sheared corn stalks waiting the wonder of an economically viable cellulosic ethanol trade. Breakfast, with everything back to form, will be scrambled eggs and a roll left over from Thursday’s dinner. She will not speak until I have had too much butter. I will see the idle love in her eyes that is common to our age, and we will small talk our glorious way into the daily typical. I am a lucky man in these things: a very, very lucky man. Just like every other man. Just like the collection of many experiences colors me to be. Just like anyone who can see the odds coming.
