On Thursday, I met my supervisor. On Friday, I finished moving and went to IKEA. On Saturday I went to Stirling to stay overnight at Veronika’s place. As all these are extremely demanding and remarkable accomplishments, I now decided that I can reward myself appropriately. So now I’m sitting on the blue sofa in our living-room, drinking tea with milk and eating chocolate chip biscuits. I decided that I will have an unrestricted amount of chocolate chip biscuits. I’ll start with 6 and see how it goes (I start counting: one.).
Biscuit 2: It was sad to leave the student accommodation. It was such a wonderful time; so strange to realise it’s over, and will never repeat. I won’t miss my flatmates at all though, only Yuki. I already miss him. He’s great; I remember he was the first person I interacted with when I moved in: he helped me to drag my enormous suitcase upstairs. So, who do you think it will be who will help me to drag my enormous suitcase downstairs when I move out? Of course, Yuki again. When we were standing downstairs in icy wind, he told me that I was the best flatmate! How sweet. I told him that I felt exactly the same about him.
Biscuit 3: At Veronika’s, we (Veronika, Dace and me) saw an Argentinian film (Valentin), while the gentlemen (Cesar (Veronika’s husband) and Jose) were playing chess. They played 2 games, Cesar won both. Before that, we had a heated discussion around the following closely related issues: jobs in Economic Development; whether it is worthwhile to pursue a PhD; our knowledge of Econometrics; our mental and psychological abilities.
Biscuit 4: Talking about Econometrics. On Friday, I slept alone in the new flat, which was quite a … torture I would say. I was extremely alert and woke up from each sound outside. But the main thing was ONE PARTICULAR SOUND IN THE FLAT ITSELF. It was something between floor creaking, a clock ticking and water dripping. I investigated the case thoroughly to discover that, according to the preliminary estimation, the sound was generated by the storeroom in the living-room. I spent 15 minutes in the said place trying to figure out what on earth it could be, but without any success. I went to bed, and the sound continued at certain intervals. I examined the series and established that the intervals were not exactly regular (so I concluded that it could not be a clock, neither a bomb, the latter being somewhat comforting). It was quite eerie. At a certain point I got a bit dramatic (probably due to mental and physical exhaustion) and instructed myself: ‘THINK. Your brain is the only weapon against the complexities and dangers of this world. You are more than halfway through your MSc in Economics. You have studied growth theories, monetary models, statistical and mathematical tools, so THINK’ (Biscuit 5). I was trying to apply the knowledge I already had; can I solve this problem by backward induction (see (Un?)Sustainable Development)? Can I run an OLS? Or shall I try taking logs and differentiating? When the time I had spent puzzling was long enough (means I had a long enough series already), I had a very vague impulse to stand up, peep into Gujarati and see if COINTEGRATION was possible and whether I could do it with a trivial and imprecise statistical package (my head), but fortunately for both myself and the phenomenon in question, upon this thought I fell asleep.
Biscuit 6: the sound is still there, as before; I can hear it right now, from the sofa. However, since it doesn’t appear to bring any harm upon anyone, I think I shall come to terms with it and let us coexist. Elisa will come tonight to stay over, and maybe we can do some further research. (She took Advanced Econometrics, which is a great asset in this particular case.)
1 Comment
Saturday, 23 June 2007 at 12:16 pm
Good idea. I’ll give it a shot, but with brownies instead of biscuits.