See no evil, hear no evil, or at least pay no attention to evil

So the past two weeks have been a bit stressful. I recently completed my interviews for my clinical internship and now have to wait for the results. Because the people who run such things are all deranged psychopaths who find torturing graduate students more fulfilling than beating puppies, the national matching service makes you wait three weeks after you submit your ranking list to tell you where and if you matched. Mind you, the match requires nothing more than the application of a very simple algorithm to a relatively small group of lists. I am sure that given the proper software the average desktop computer can perform this task in under a minute. We wait 30,240 minutes. Then all of the results are delivered at once to all of the clinical psychology graduate students in the US and Canada. This allows everyone to call all of their classmates and congratulate one another on their success or find out how many Flinstones Vitamins are required for a lethal dose.

A wise person takes opportunities such as this one to learn a little something about themselves. You can use the experience to help you really examine your priorities, your way of dealing with stress, and the all-to-human tendency to allow anxiety over that which you cannot control to compromise full and total self-actualization.

Or you can go to Vegas.

So I am leaving for Vegas the day I find out if I’m getting called up to the majors (so to speak) largely so that I can distract myself if the news is bad. I have been perusing the distraction coping strategy now for about a week and a half, but I am starting to run out of bars, plays, and concerts. No, Chicago simply is not distracting enough; only Vegas has enough neon, vice, and excess to keep me from dwelling upon the prospect of another pointless year of research. Additionally, one of my friends from college will be having a bachelor’s party in Vegas that weekend … sort of … it’s complicated.

You see, the friend in question is marrying a lovely woman who hates all of his friends with every fiber of her being. I haven’t even met her and yet I am certain she hates me by association. Somehow, for reasons I cannot even pretend to understand, the job of purchasing the groom’s ticket to Vegas fell to his bride-to-be. Not surprisingly, she hasn’t found time to take care of this yet. But wait … this gets dumber.

We decided to just get one exceptionally large suite in Vegas rather than several smaller rooms. This suite was reserved under the Groom’s name and the name of his best man. The groom’s best man knows none of the other people invited to our little sock-hop and may or may not attend if the groom flakes out. This has the potential to leave 10 + of us wandering around the strip without a hotel room. But wait … there’s more.

Some of us are driving from San Francisco, some of us are flying from San Francisco, one is bussing out from Colorado, one is flying from Boston, and the rest of us are flying from Chicago. No more than three people are taking the same flight or car. So we are all planning to meet up once we get to Vegas (drum roll please) magically!

Yes, we have no plan regarding how we are going to meet up. Somehow a dozen or more people are supposed to somehow run into one another somewhere in Vegas. We know the name of the hotel, and presumably someone will be there sometime, but this is by no means assured.

Whatever happens, whatever stupidity ensues, at least I will have neither time nor energy to consider my potential professional failure. At the very least, my first trip to Vegas should be distracting. Of course, all entertaining stupidity will be dutifully recorded here.