Two Things

Thing One: My classical education has been lacking, so only now am I reading King Lear, and only now am I discovering the source of "Bury my body" and "Sit you down, Father," in "I am the Walrus." I guess there's a lot more of that scene in that song, but those are the lines that I notice. Everyone else already knows. I knew as soon as I got to "bury my body" in Act IV; the line spoke itself in the voice in the song, which was not the voice I had been using for Oswald until that time. Weird. Also, while looking that up on the Web (because I forgot what song the lines appear in), I read about the Paul-Is-Dead thing, which, yes, I did already know about. I know about it, and don't believe it, but man. It's spooky! And all I really know (or think I know) is that the man who has "been" Paul McCartney my entire life appears to be one of the two remaining Beatles. Maybe he really isn't. Maybe he's just really good at pretending to be Paul McCartney. For decades. With a wife (2! but no longer) and children (several!). And he's the right age. Even if he weren't Paul McCartney originally, isn't he Paul McCartney now? It's weird.

Thing Two: Also kind of weird, in a spooky and pathetic sort of way, because of what it says about what really matters to me right now. I was eating my lunch today, slowing getting through a sandwich which I didn't much like. It had chicken lunch meat on it, and the lunch meat had been in my fridge for awhile now, but it seemed okay. No green spots, and didn't smell bad. It tasted okay. I think my fridge is too cold, though I keep turning it up (or down, depending on how you look at it, and if you understand anything about temperature). Anyway, I was about 2/3 of the way through my not-so-yummy sandwich when I suddenly felt really sick to my stomach. So much that I thought I might have nasty, embarrassing sick-type problems involving the waste basket. I was glad that I did not have those problems, but I still felt nauseated. I wondered if it were the sandwich, and so threw it in the waste basket. But it didn't seem like a food-borne (bourn? bourne? born?) illness. I wondered if something horrible had happened to my family, and if I should call them and find out if they were all okay. But I didn't, because I know that's silly. After a few minutes, I felt better.

Then, Peter came in. He came in with bad news about the program we use to convert raw tagging data to the data format we need for the other program, which we use to do the analyses that we have been doing and redoing since last fall. Over and over and over again as we discover more and more and more errors in the data and in the converting program. We finally paused in our analysis and re-analysis fun some time in January, and did a bang-up beta test of the converting program, and spent a lot of time making it just right, and checking and rechecking it. And then we re-ran the data in it, and then spent about 3 weeks reanalyzing the re-run data, and fixing up everything, and getting the results on the web, and I'm supposed to be doing the report if I ever get time. And I really just want it all to END. I'm tired of it. And so is my boss, who would be really, really upset if we had to do it all over again. Really, seriously upset. So Peter's news was BAD. Potentially, anyway. It turned out that the error applies only to data that we haven't run, so our version of the data should be okay, at least as far as this is concerned. WHEW. Yay. That is a good thing. After we realized that it was a false alarm, I asked Peter when he had discovered this error. And when was that? At the same time that I had suddenly felt ill, right out of the blue! Yes. It's true. He was so freaked out about this potentially horrible development, and I am so attuned to any problem with these freakin' data, that he must have sent out shock waves, shock waves that I received. It's almost enough to make me doubt Paul.