One morning, I woke up and looked outside the window: sun rays had generously poured over the head of the Statue of Liberty, and the winding tourist line in front of Battery Park was especially long. Light green buds had, from nowhere, crowded on otherwise bare branches. Spring was here.

A few years ago, during a cold bleak winter night in the Bates library, Saif and I mused over the many recent break-ups of out friends and commented on how hearts grew cold due to icy weather. But, when spring came, we optimisted, the hearts would soon become warm and toasty.

Spring 2008 - I snuggled at Mugg's warm and toasty heart as we strolled down Seventh Ave, happily away from the office earlier than usual on a Friday night. We had talked the night before about "life correlation", a statistic concept based on the correlation coefficient we looked at on daily basis at NERA. "My life is correlated to your mouth. When your mouth goes down my happiness goes down, when it goes up my happiness goes up," he said grimly, pulling the two corners of my mouth down and up into a frown and a smile.

I had laughed brightly at such silly thinking, but was deeply touched and amused. "So it was a good thing, then, that our life correlation coefficient is positive. And statistically significantly different than zero."

And I thus felt my own warm and toasty heart.