Seemingly Unrelated Regressions

Some days, every day is an event. Wake up in celebrity mode, whistle an incoherent tune between the toothpaste and the spit… Waltz in to work, shoot out gold and silver stars like Harry quite didn’t in the fourth book… Whip up a cuisine and relax while at it, and cool it off, knowing tomorrow is going to be just as awesome…

Then there are others- a pity that the old Pope Gregory XIII added to the otherwise already dull and pointless array of dates. Wake up swearing. Spill paste out of the brush. Demotivated work, shooting passersby with rulers and empty coke bottles, imagining them to be hand cannons. Lie down hungry, head spinning out of control in the thought that every day is just the same…

With an evil 300 odd kms back in place between me and A, the week has progressively moved to regression. Like regress, the opposite of progress, not the statistical thingy where you force a bunch of points onto a nice functional form. Interesting that other than the niceties of the telecom giants that gave back their 2G booty in slashed STD rates, regression is quite the respite. Researchy and all…

Since the day A’s plan got semi-frozen, days have moved closer towards pity days. That is not to say the celebrity ones weren’t- just lowered in frequency. Weekend plans, dinner get-aways… A’s a genius planner with the persistence to see them executed. I’m not complaining.

My first taste of real statistical modeling came by with something called Seemingly Unrelated Regression. The rough idea is that the error terms are correlated, so what might seem like an unrelated regression to a myopic, astigmatic mortal like my self was actually not quite. Statisticians are still actively debating on whether to call it Seemingly Related Regression instead. True, that’s the kind of debates statisticians have.

To me, the SUR model speaks of something more philosophical. A bunch of things that seem unrelated to lesser mortals, in which case you would place each of these in a separate box in your head, could actually have some randomness at the end that you just decided to not consider, considering this being random and all, that was actually not that random when you considered the rest of the bunch of things together. It also showed me that I could write insanely long sentences without Word’s grammar nazis painting the whole page red.

Totally unrelated (seemingly), I decide today is a celebrity day. With reasons, of course.. Today is exactly 2 days after exactly 1 year when A’s and my folks decided that approximately 8 and a half months hence we would officiate the oaths we had shared a couple of yearsago. Every day with A is a celebration. Seriously. There isa tensed getting-ready. There are plans. There is awesome food, cooked by us, greater folks or a burrp certified restaurant. There is fun and music. There is a fair bit of dance. There is the moment of relaxation that can only be compared to diwali days in high school, towards noon when the sound of crackers have subsided to little kids with kuruvi and extra bijjlis, and the area boys who have kept at it from a month before, and surely a month after. As you savor the spicy-sweet lagiyam and roll back to watch Baasha on Sun TV for the millionth time. That relaxation.

With A around, there’s always life. Even if she’s curled with her Doris whos-that-name, or a brick sized book written by some Sundaramoorty Iyengar on the exploits of something at sometime, causing something. And then hear her views and debates, knowing that all all other mortals would merely have condensed tweet of comment thread on facebook. I haven’t really touched that xbox much. It is no fun playing without A asking me to shut it off.

So that’s the other thing about SUR. Sometimes, the gold and silver sparks seem flying about and yet there is a seemingly regressed air, quite unrelated to events, days and calendar. Just a passing mood. An annoying wind of depression.

I never really liked mobile phones. Come to think of it, I don’t think they liked me all that much either. It’s not the same. Not even close. I try to think about how I survived all the time before the 1 year and 2 days milestone, or between that and the 3 months and 18 days milestone… Or then and the 6 months and 5 days milestone.

The more I think about it, the regressive pattern seems pretty related. I’m just going to curse Gregory and think about the celebrity day round the corner…