Checking yourself.

One thing I've learned is to trust your impressions of situations and trends -- if you're seeing something, it's probably there, on some level.

On the other hand, it's also nice to have statistical confirmation that you're not off-base or paranoid or anything like that.

Like, a few months ago I was reading an article about local homelessness in the college town that I now live in, and it said that it's **doubled** in a two-year period during which I've lived in the town, and the next round of statistics are coming in soon, and they'll likely show that it's since become even higher.

Like, it's like I'm not on crack, and I truly have been seeing a big change here, even for during the relatively short time that I've been living here!

It's just like how I was saying drivers had become crazy in the city that I used to live in -- I actually stopped taking long-distance bike rides for leisure, because of that -- and then years later someone crunches numbers, and yep, some valid data showed a huge jump-up in crazy driving behavior like right around the time that I had noticed that and had changed my behavior, it wasn't just me being dramatic.

I've also had people suggest that my perceptions of crime in the city that I used to live in might have been biased because of increasingly dramatic news coverage, but I always push back, and say how I worked in the same areas for a period of years,and there was an increase of crime in those immediate areas, that just wasn't there before, and that's something happening, even if it's not captured in whatever statistics have you about overall crime levels.