As a Geography major and a bit of an obsessive about all things urban, I’m bothered by sloppy social science. Tonight’s example involved my participation in a research study where one of the questions was “how many cities of over one million population have you lived in?”. She just didn’t understand that I needed a concrete explanation of whether she was referring to central city or metropolitan population, and she couldn’t see why it mattered…
While I’ve never lived in a CITY of a million people (San Francisco is just shy of 800,000), I’ve lived in METROPOLITAN AREAS of over a million people for all but the three (sucky, miserable) months of my life spent in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in 1986…
Am I just being anal?
Mark‘s back from Fresno in a few minutes with presents and clean laundry, and I’ll be able to sleep better tonight. Funny how he should mention in his new “100 Things” essay (currently on the front page with no perma-link) that he sleeps better when I’m in bed with him. I was just about to do a journal entry on the same subject. It’s amazing; I’ve never been able to sleep with anyone in the same room with me before, much less the same bed…
This from the one who used to pick up boys in bars, bring them home, have sex, and then force them to leave, baffled, by telling them “it’s too bad you have to go now”, even when they’d previously expressed no such need…