Life is weird, as summarized in the following syllogism:

  1. Social events for graduate students are rare events.
  2. Independently distributed1 rare events obey Poissonian statistics.
  3. Events obeying Poissonian statistics tend to exhibit what is known as Poisson clumping.2
  4. Therefore, social events for graduate students inevitably tend to exhibit temporal coincidence, i.e. I have long periods of boring individual existence with occasional interstices of intense socialization.

The evidence:

  1. On July 15, I had to choose between kayaking at a state park with the local Singaporean graduate student community, an American friend’s tie-dye party, and a Vietnamese barbeque event in a county forest preserve.
  2. On July 28, I have a friend’s birthday to attend, a group outing to watch the Simpsons’ movie at a drive-in theater at a nearby city, and I might have a academic meeting to go to in the neighboring state.
  3. The ACS National Meeting in Boston runs August 19-23; Edward Tufte’s legendary course on the visualization and presentation of quantitative data in the Midwest either August 23 or 24; and I’ve already agreed to go with my friend to this year’s regional Renaissance Faire on August 25-26.

Ah, life.

Footnotes
  1. In the absence of known correlations, iid is kosher.↩
  2. Curiously enough, the Wikipedia article has no reference to this phenomenon.↩