once upon a time, back when i was a young 18 year old, i was browsing through booklets containing stage one university courses (the whole website thing was not so mainstream back then - lucky, because i always liked highlighting and circling interesting classes - something that cannot be done online - but i digress...).

and my wise father said to me "you know rebekah, statistics will always be handy to have" and notably pushed me in the direction of doing a little stage one course on the aforementioned topic. at the time i was not too eager. coming from a family of mathematicians, it's sometimes nice to be out of the loop and do my own thing. however he persisted, i wavered, and the next thing you know, there i was, 8am, five days a week, semester one, first year of university.

since then i declared i could escape the clutches of the subject. i went off onto tangents involving greek monumental architecture and egyptian hieroglyphics. i pursued geography and how natural and cultural processes throughout the earth mix and mingle. i wrote, i drew, i painted, i lived outside in the dirt discovering what lies beneath the surface we live on. yet, somehow, no matter how hard i tried, statistics always reappeared...

imagine wandering the ruins of ancient greece, taking in the beauty of an ancient estate, that handled olive production for the nearby region in 500bc - only to have the bubble broken by being shown a greek script in the form of a ready reckoner table (to this day i still am unaware exactly what such a table is, however i am fairly confident that it has something to do with maths and that perhaps my former teacher, mr poleki, once mentioned it in class, interrupting my attempts at opening a calculator with my keyring screwdriver).

imagine being on the most beautiful beach in new zealand, with only two other people in the near vicinity. a beach that stretches for 7km in a gentle curve, bright blue sky echoed by a deeper blue ocean. and to suddenly discover that in order to understand the reason for thousands of stones strewn high up above sea level on the dunes, statistical sampling techniques need to be put into action (for your information, the stones are believed to have arrived via a large tidal wave caused by a volancic eruption off the coast many hundreds of years ago).

imagine living in a tiny town of weaving cobbled stone streets and canals in the very centre of europe. where bells chime every hour in delightful tunes of all varieties (just the other day i was reminded of that very humourous musical feat involving bell type instruments, the merrimans, the haines and stella), and where it snows the perfect amount so that it is never all slushy and muddy but allows for snowballs to be thrown. imagine this, and then to find that the supervisor in charge of the dominant piece of assessment due for the year - expects statistical analysis to be understood and calculated for my little village sites in the mountains of turkey.

just as clark kent's destiny was to save the world, it seems that the merriman family's destiny was to be surrounded by numbers. my rebellion on the matter seems not to make the slightest bit of difference.