Simpson's Paradox

Harold and I live in a lovely, classic apartment building, with a small, rounded pool just outside our door. He goes to swim at lunch every day, and sometimes I go to the pool just to put my feet in the water. Also, our wifi reaches to the pool, so I have spent a great deal of time this summer lying next to the pool reading or writing. Covered in SPF 5,000, but still. Lying in a deck chair writing about videogames is pretty great.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this here, but everyone in our building is about a hundred years old, so the pool is never loud or crowded. The other residents are all owners, and have lived here for years, even decades, and there’s some sort of owner’s board, too.  Our neighbors could not hide their delight when they discovered that the new people in The Rental Unit were a young professional couple and not students.

At night, the pool is lit from below, and it makes blue ripples across our ceiling, and it’s so tempting that sometimes we run down and go swimming at night even though I’m pretty sure the pool’s meant to be closed after dark.

Sometimes I say that Harold works all night, but the other night it was literally midnight and Harold was still putting out producer-y fires, and I couldn’t make him come outside with me. I went down alone, and sat by the steps, and dipped my feet in the blue-lit pool, and it was wonderfully warm. North Carolina and I do not always (ever) get along, but the warm summer evenings are lovely. The bottom of my skirt got splashed, so I might as well get in a little more, and then my t-shirt was wet too, so I just jumped in.  I swam until I got tired, and then I lay on my back in the warm, bright pool, looking up at the stars. And it was awesome.

So that, in case the president of the board is wondering, is why there was a 30-year-old woman swimming with her clothes on in the middle of the night.

Now there’s a roundabout on my way to work. I’ve been working offsite for a couple weeks, driving to Raleigh, and while I loved the school, I’ll admit to looking out at the 40 traffic sometimes and feeling like a mythological figure unable to escape her tragic fate. And while I wasn’t driving my nice short easy commute, a brand new roundabout was built. You win this round, North Carolina.

I’m not saying that people here love driving and hate turn signals, but here’s the local paper, the News & Observers, noting 84 crashes after a year’s operation of the Hillsborough roundabout.  The N&O has a followup story describing how “Traffic engineers realized some drivers would have trouble, so they published an illustrated navigation guide before the roundabout opened“. It makes Harold sad when I say mean things about the locals, so I’ll just post those without further comment.

“There’s a new roundabout on my commute,” I said grumpily, to a perfectly nice local person.

“A what?”

Right, roundabout. Sometimes I’ll say something the British way and it usually feels like a greeting from my Scottish granny. A word I must have learned from her, or heard her say, and now I say it that way too. It usually makes me very happy.

“I meant a rotary.” I tried again. But I’m not in Massachusetts, so that also got me a blank stare. “A freaking traffic circle?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what everyone driving through it is also thinking.”