Woo HOO!

I found out this morning that someone somewhere wants me as an intern. I'll know more by Monday, but for now it is off to Vegas.

Chapter 2: The Wash U Guy Strikes Back

Chapter 2

Two months after my initial encounter with Wash U guy I had finished the major project in one of my classes and was looking for a way to celebrate. A friend had a bunch of psychedelic mushrooms and offered to share. I had lived a relatively monastic life since the debauchery that was Dillo Day, so I agreed. The set-up was similar to Dillo Day. This time there were about 6 of us (with 3 overlapping members from DD) and we decided to confine our wanderings to the house. After a few hours everyone was well on their way to oblivion, and we heard a knock at the door. When we opened it we saw Wash U guy. I immediately thought I was having some sort of bad trip. It was simply impossible for Wash U guy to be there again while I was tripping. We had not seen him since Dillo Day and it was too big of a coincidence for him to again arrive under the EXACT SAME SET OF CIRCUMSTANCES.

He walked in and asked, “Hey guys. What are you up to? Listening to some music?”

As I sit here a few years later and ston- cold sober I still don’t exactly know how to answer that question. There was music playing so it was obvious that we were listening to music. Was he looking for a yes? For more information? Lest you have any doubts, this was an actual question. It was not some sort of idiosyncratic greeting that did not demand a response. Both the inflection used and the long pause at the end indicated that this was a genuine inquiry regarding what appeared to be an obvious state of affairs.

We all looked at one another trying to figure out who was coherent enough to understand/respond to this request. The answer, frankly, was no one. I think Wash U guy gave up on an answer after awhile and sat down.

I was in no mood to pretend to be normal again and was about to let Wash U guy know about the mushrooms when another guy walked in. A freshman had come over from one of the dorms to see what was going on at the house. The freshman was a little excitable when it came to things that were illegal and I knew that now, for better or worse, I was stuck trying to behave as if I had not just sucked down a sizable quantity of neurotoxic mushrooms. The situation deteriorated rapidly.

Another person in the room somehow started to believe that the freshman was sent by “the authorities” as some sort of spy. Spy for whom or what purpose we were never able to ascertain. All we could really get out the paranoid mushroom eater was that he was certain there was a turncoat in our midst and the infiltrator had to be dealt with immediately. After several minutes of intense whispering in which we tried to convince our now delusional friend that no “authorities” had any interest in us, he decided to make his accusations public. He violently rose to his full height, pointed his finger at the freshman, and bellowed in his loudest theater-major voice, “J‘ ACCUSE!”

The freshman had no response for this because 1) he didn’t speak French and was not familiar with Les Misarable or 2) it was insane. All in all, I thought the freshman handled himself very well. It is not easy to know how to respond to a de-contextualized accusation made in a foreign language. Given no further information, he decided to laugh politely in the hope that something less awkward would follow. Sadly, this was not the case.

“Should you be writing this down for your report?” the asked the paranoid theater major menacingly.

Again denied sufficient information to base a reasonable response, the freshman joked, “yeah, I am helping President B---- put you guys on double secret probation.”

Sarcasm was unfortunately beyond the paranoid theater major’s capacities at this point. He took this as confirmation of his worst fears and ran out of the room. Now often when one says that someone has run out of a room, they mean that the person left the room quickly. Not in this instance. When I say the paranoid theater major ran out of the room, I mean he tried to sprint through the coffee table, fell, picked himself up, and then sprinted out of the house running into several walls along the way. Furthermore, I am not really sure why he ran. Perhaps he thought the freshman had been granted police powers and was about to make an arrest.

The freshman was understandably confused, but seemed to let the issue go when another couple of people came into the room to ask if he wanted to join them at the campus bar. I later found out that one of my friends who was also in the room anticipated that no good could come out of this collection of people at this exact time, and dispatched the other people with the bar invitation in an attempt to avoid any unpleasantness. He failed.

Throughout all of this Wash U guy remained silent. Once the freshman left he said, “Sorry I missed your party last time. My friends were pretty tired.” No mention was made of the previous 20 minutes of insanity. It was like he hadn’t noticed. He then stayed in the room with the five remaining mushroom-intoxicated individuals for another hour. I don’t know exactly what he did the entire time because eventually I decided to ignore him. After an hour we decided to walk around campus, and Wash U guy said that he was going to head back to his friends. He said that he’d stop by again, but we were sure he was lying. A reasonable person would have concluded that our house was inhabited by a collegiate version of the Manson family, and it was only a matter of time before we lost our tenuous contact with reality for good. We assumed the only reason he didn’t run out of our house earlier was fear that he might be attacked by the stark-raving mad, musical theater fan he knew was prowling about. As you might imagine, we were wrong again. Wash U guy was not a reasonable person.

Stay tuned for Chapter 3: the return of Wash U guy. Of if you hate this series, don’t worry; there is only one more left.

Wash U Chapter 1

Hi everyone,

While at a small soiree thrown in honor of one of my friend’s return to the United States an odd thing happened. An older man arrived at our party and asked to see one of the guests. Now this would not be terribly strange had this been a larger gathering, but in a small group of a dozen people who know one another very well, it was kind of weird. One of my fiends asked, “so … how do you know E----?” He was rewarded with awkward silence. My friend didn’t seem to know how to respond to the silence, so he let him in. This just proves that an utter lack of social skills can be handy. Next time someone asks you a question you’d rather not answer, just stare at them. They’ll be too uncomfortable to be insistent.

Eventually it was determined that the older man in question did know our friend and was not some sort of poorly socialized collection agent or a bizarrely well-informed mass-murderer. The whole scenario brought forth memories of another odd fellow from a long time ago: Wash U guy. In order to preserve the strange yet true tale of Wash U guy, I’ve decide to record it as a series of blog entries. Enjoy.

(Fair warning, this is kind of a long story. I suggest you go to the bathroom now if necessary)

We first met Wash U guy during the last week of Winter quarter during my Junior year of college. The college I attended was a serious place full of serious students who did everything very seriously. While there were outposts of slackers (and I was an occasional member of such an outpost), most took college very, very seriously. All of this seriousness led to periodic explosions of drunken, self-abandoned fun. The pressure was simply too much; release had to be found. Often you’d find a very serious chemistry student who had finished her organic chemistry test at noon was blind drunk, half-naked and screaming along to Dexie’s Midnight Raiders by five PM. Generally these orgies of self-destruction were solo affairs and relatively disconnected to the surrounding college community … except for one day of the year. On one day all of the undergraduates coordinated their emotional collapses so that they would happen at once (along with a barbeque). This periodic destruction of all that was scholastic and serious took place on the Saturday before Winter reading week and was called Dillo Day.

A senior told me on my first Dillo Day that it was the one day a year when “those who don’t drink get drunk, those who don’t take drugs get high, and those who get high get really high.” In keeping with these instructions, I had planned a particularly brutal regimen for myself. I planned to begin the day at the afore mention outpost of slackerdom with the traditional DD breakfast of eggs and beer. Following such sustenance two friends and I had planned to eat a hit of acid along with a particularly good dose of E. While I am not typically such a stoned freak, it is easy to get carried away on a special occasion.

By 2 PM I was blissfully aware that nothing I was thinking made even a little bit of sense. Despite this inner maelstrom of tangential and illogical thinking my conversation skills remained somewhat coherent, and I found I could participate in a dialog for a couple of minutes without saying something incomprehensibly weird. Most importantly, I was relatively certain I would remember all that occurred. It turns out I was largely correct in this assumption (though details are a bit fuzzy).

By this point in the afternoon most of the drunk and merely high people had passed out for a nap leaving only those who were tripping awake. We had assembled in one room and were entertaining one another with our stupidity. It is into this morass of psychedelic nonsense that Wash U guy made his first appearance.

Apparently we left the front door open and Wash U guy decided it would be perfectly appropriate to drop in and wander around until he found someone awake. Eventually he found his way to our room and introduced himself. He said his name, which we promptly forgot, and explained something about visiting friends at our college from Wash U. He then unsuccessfully attempted to have conversations with us that went something like this.

Wash U: So, what year are you in school?
Tripping person: Are you talking to me or him?
Wash U: Him?
Tripping person: sorry, that is what I thought.
Wash: What???
Tripping person: (10 seconds of silence)
Tripping person: Did you say something?

Another conversation went something like this.

Wash U: Did you check out the bands by the lake yet?
Tripping person: Oh no, there isn’t going to be a band at the party.
Another TP: No he is talking about the lake concerts.
Tripping person: No the party is going to be here, not at the lake. The administration won’t let us on the lake because it is made of water and we would drown.
Room: general laughter
Tripping person: no, think about it!

In addition to our sparkling small talk abilities, we looked very, very strange. One group of women brought over a bunch of colored candles and had been playing with them earlier in the day. Unfortunately the dye in these candles proved to be stubborn, so all of their exposed skin was rainbow colored. I, on the other hand, had found a supply of glitter. Liking the effect of the bouncing rays of light, I had covered my face in it. I had also found a cowboy hat somewhere and claimed it as my own. Altogether, I must have resembled the world’s ugliest showgirl (or a transvestite in serious need of a make-over). Another person was sitting on his back playing with his fingers because they looked, “really cool on the ceiling.” After sitting among what must have seemed to be a gathering of brain-damaged, postmodern circus clowns for indeterminable length of time, Wash U guy left saying he would attend our party later that night. He didn’t, and we thought he had frightened the poor man out of our lives forever. We were terribly wrong.

The Good Dr. is Dead

Hi all,

Noticing that my blog had become a little heavy in the past few entries, I had resolved to write about a light, funny topic today. My frantic attempts to distract myself from the impending match day have resulted in some really impressive depravity, but an account of my accelerating moral decline will have to wait for another day. Today I heard that Hunter S. Thompson has killed himself.

I assume most are familiar with Hunter S. Thompson, but for those who are not … imagine this blog if the topics were more interesting and written with more skill. Seriously, a great deal of the way I write and the way I think is a pseudo-conscious imitation of Thopmson. He possessed a cynicism that managed to be endearing rather than biting, and he wrote with unparalleled wit. His were the books that you avoided reading in public for fear of collapsing into fits of uncontrollable laughter (unless you didn’t want to share a seat while riding public transportation, then HST was the way to go).

Though I admire his writing, there is perhaps a more important aspect to Hunter S. Thompson that I will mourn. Thompson was unabashedly weird. He was attracted to strange people and was part of strange things. He seemed to hate convention as much as he was hated by the conventional. (I believe it was Nixon who once called him representative of the evil, violent side of America.) I can’t help but feel that people would be happier, healthier, and a hell of a lot more free if we all followed Thompson’s example and appreciated oddity rather than condemning it. Conformists are boring; the world needs more freaks.

I don’t understand why Thompson killed himself, and frankly I don’t want to consider the implications of that action right now. Instead I will concentrate upon finding some small way to celebrate what Thompson’s writings brought to my life. If any of you would like to join me, here are the ideas I’ve come up with so far.

1. Become a goth for a day. So you work in an investment bank; who cares? If a black business suit is good, then black fingernails must be even better. (Alternatively, if you are a goth, dress like a young Republican for a day. Nothing is more disconcerting than seeing extensive body modifications on some guy wearing a polo shirt.)

2. Take some mescaline and harangue a local politician about something/anything/nothing. It probably doesn’t matter what you previously planned to say once you’ve taken the mescaline; it’s all bound to come out as some anger gibberish tirade anyway.

3. Take a few of your most depraved friends, a supply of your favorite psychoactive substances, big sunglasses, and a fedora to one of those large gatherings of the self-righteous in which a thin veneer of creepy wholesomeness covers a core of judgment and aggression (for example, a Promise Keepers rally). Participate enthusiastically.

Freak Power!

PS - I wanted to thank the person who lent me the book. It looks very good, and I am planning to begin to read it today instead of working.

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.

Sell-out Doctor Network Strikes for the last time

(Warning, very long rant ahead. You should get a snack)

Today you will find me a very angry graduate student. One of the many ways I have found to waste time over the previous three months has been obsessive monitoring of the Student Doctor Network’s clinical psychology forum. Today, I stop. I have finally had enough of listening to people whine about the field of psychology and pontificate on subjects with which they are unfamiliar. I’ve had enough of the whining about money, enough of the whining about social workers, and enough of the whining about affirmative action. Every time I browse the forums I just find myself pissed off that so many shallow, intellectually dishonest, uncaring people have mysteriously decided to employ themselves in a helping profession. What, there aren’t enough consulting jobs to go around?

I suppose I should probably give a little more background. The SDN forums are designed so that students will have the ability to share information about their professions directly with other students. Unfortunately, all of the threads in the clinical psychology forum turn into one of three debates.

1. Psychologists don’t make enough money.
2. Ph.D. psychologists are better (smarter, better trained, more physically fit, etc) than Psy.D. psychologists.
3. Affirmative action is “unfair” because “two wrongs don’t make a right” and “racism isn’t a factor in 21st century America.”

Bullshit! All of it! Yes, psychology is not the most lucrative field in the world but it is not as if psychologists have to moonlight at McDonald’s to pay their rent. It would be kind of funny if they did (Cust: Can I supersize that? Psych: it is not my place to tell you what you can and can’t do), but they don’t. If you wanted to make a ton of money, then pick a career that pays well. Go be an accountant or actuary or gagsta rapper but get the hell out of my profession. I don’t want to work with you if money is your primary concern. If the rewards of helping others and a modest though comfortable income are insufficient motivation for you, then psychology is not your field. Similarly, I am sick and tired of all of these disparaging comments directed toward PsyDs. Clinical psychology Ph.D. programs have lower acceptance rates than any programs other than veterinary schools. There just aren’t enough positions in Ph.D. programs to accommodate all of the talented and qualified people who may want to become psychologists. If we did not train psychologists in Psy.D. programs, then psychology would be even less available to those in need than it is right now. In a world in which 19 out of 20 people who are treated for depression do not receive the benefit of therapy this is unacceptable. And this isn’t just sectarian advocacy on my part; I am in a Ph.D. program.

(I told you that you should get a snack)

Finally we come to affirmative action and diversity within the field of psychology. The Sell-out Doctor Network is populated by a whole bunch of relatively privileged white kids who are constantly getting their panties in a wad over diversity initiatives within the field of psychology. I constantly have to trudge through the same tired old neo-con arguments talking about “reverse discrimination” and how diversity is “watering down” the field of psychology. They further assert that “the world has changed since LBJ instituted AA, and it is no longer needed.” To these arguments I present my well-reasoned and measured response … F*ck You!

First of all mental health is not like other industries. Unlike the CEOs of major corporations, mental health professionals directly serve the varied communities in which they practice. It is imperative that there is come congruence between the ethnic diversity one finds in population and the ethnic distribution of service providers. Underserved communities will continue to be underserved until such congruence is reached. Second, it pains my heart when supposed social scientists suggest that discrimination is no longer a factor in 21st century America. They should know better. Countless studies suggest that implicit racism is alive and well in America even among those who do not consciously profess racist beliefs. Finally, I find it incredibly offensive when people compare difficulty getting into the University of Michigan with true racism in all of its ugly fury. When I most recently read these posts I had just come from the Chicago indymedia website where I had been reading about Lt. John Burge of our fine Chicago Police Department. Good Lt. Burge is being investigated for torturing dozens of black men into confessing to crimes they did not commit. These men were held without being given a phone call or access to an attorney while he and his henchmen used tazers, batons, and loaded guns to convince suspects to cooperate. Most suspects seem to have been selected at random. Of course, no white victims have been identified. That is real racism; going to your safety school is not.

By the way, I don’t mean for this to offend anyone who disagrees with my position on AA. I have heard reasonable arguments against the program in other instances. The part of this that really offended me was the self-serving nature of the arguments as they were being made among the sell-out doctors. It is clear these individuals do not give a damn about racial equality if it means they will be less likely to get a big NIH grant after their post-doc.

In a way this is part of a larger sort of disillusionment. I went into psychology as a crusader. I wanted to join with other like-minded people and “rescue” the mentally ill (naïve, I know). Unfortunately I have discovered that psychology is just a job for many people. If that is all it is, then there are better jobs; it is too hard to help people for nothing more than money. In the end I am not sure whether I am more angry at all of the other psychologists for treating this profession with such nonchalance or scared that eventually I will too.

Things Tyler will eat and things that make him hide under the table.

Hi everyone (or no one, it’s hard to tell),

Hope you had a happy Valentine’s Day. My wife and I engaged in our traditional Valentine’s Day activity of cooking a ridiculous number of dishes and eating them over the course of an evening. I really like to cook, so this gives me an opportunity to try complicated recipes I would not usually have time to make. I know, it must shock many of you that I can honestly say I “don’t have time” for anything. After all, I appear to have time to blog, surf the net, rant on message boards, and consider the social significance of reality TV (more on this in an upcoming entry) for several hours a day. These activities, however, can be accomplished at so-called work. I cannot do prep work for cooking while at work without attracting undue attention (or maybe I can; I’ve never really tried).

Anyway, I planned a relatively complicated five-course meal for my sweetie and me that was fairly typical of the meals I had prepared in previous years. However, unlike previous years, my wife and I had company for Valentine’s Day. We were joined by our one-year-old dog named Tyler.

One of our favorite activities we share with our dog is playing the “will he eat this” game. Tyler will eat nearly anything including paper, carrots, most relatively soft textiles, and all processed snack foods. My wife and I were both excited to play the “will he eat this” game on Valentine’s Day because we would have so many exotic foods to try. So here, without further ado, are the results from the most recent game of “will he eat this.”

Woody Asparagus Stems – You know that end part of asparagus that is really, really tough. Tyler does too … and Tyler likes it.

Good part of Asparagus – Oddly enough he prefers the woody stems.

Mesclun – Hell no. This was half-heartedly chewed for a few seconds and then discarded out of our sight. We think he does this so as to avoid offending me. Such a considerate dog.

Pate – In a heartbeat. It is kinda like expensive dog food after all. (And yes I know I am missing the accents in “pate.” Deal with it.)

Coffee Cremets – He tried this, but I don’t think his heart was into it. He would have rather had some more asparagus stem.

Steak Poivre – Yes and no. He certainly enjoyed the steak part of this, but the flambé freaked him out. It probably didn’t help that the smoke alarm also reacted badly to my flambé. He cowered under the table for a solid 30 minutes and was only willing to emerge when we placed a little bit of steak far enough away from the table that he couldn’t reach it with his paws. Considerate dog -- yes. Brave dog -- no.

If any of you have any requests for the next round of “will he eat this,” let me know. Any reasonable suggestions will be entertained.

Howdy everyone,

Today I took a much needed break from not working and stayed home all day with my dog. I am happy to say that I accomplished nothing more profound than receiving a package over the previous five hours.

All right, I’m lying. I wish I had spent the day reveling in sloth. Instead, I ended up spending most of the day cleaning. I am terribly ambivalent regarding irresponsibility. Even when I try to act as if possessed by a devil-may-care insouciance I end up doing something lame like washing the floors.

My impulse toward industriousness arose when I realized that I only had three weeks left before my wife and I will have a houseguest. At that time a prospective student will stay with us while she is interviewed for admission into my graduate school program. Typically we don’t let people see our apartment until they know us fairly well. By that time they expect the insanity with which are confronted. My perfect plan of eating junk food and napping with my perpetually tired dog was compromised by the fear that a stranger might actually see what my apartment looks like most of the time. Oh no, this will not do. Clearly I had to take decisive action.

I know what you are thinking; three weeks is a long time away. You have plenty of time to erect your façade of organization and cleanliness next week. Not so. It will take us at least three weeks to figure out all of the things that orderly people do to their apartments to make them orderly. Neither my wife nor I have an innate sense of order. We just don’t understand how reasonable people organize things. For two months we stored our tea in the laundry room – not because we were looking for a better place or we were too lazy to move it – because it didn’t really strike us as a problem! In our previous apartment we stored our spare towels under the desk for similar reasons.

So I spent several hours pretending to be neat today. I did things that seemed neat to me like washing the baseboards and dusting CDs. And even though I spent a great deal of effort trying to hide my true nature, I am sure that somehow I have failed. I am sure that there is some monument to my disorganization sitting in the middle of my living room that will be immediately noticed by my unprepared guest. She’ll say something like, “what an unusual place to store fruit” and I will realize my deception has failed. I know this now, and yet I am compelled to spend the next few weeks battling the inevitable. I think there is a existential lesson in all of this, but I can’t dwell upon it right now. I’ve got to put all of the wine in the linen closet where it belongs.

BTW – I probably won’t be updating this before Monday, so happy Valentine’s Day.

TMI vs. TLI

It seems to me that one of the primary social difficulties facing each one of us is the decision about how much personal information to share. More often than not, people share too much information. No stranger wants to hear about your tragic divorce when they ask, “how’s it going.” What they want to hear is “fine.” Truth be told, strangers don’t care how it is going for you; they just have to say something to fill that awkward silence before they ask you for something. Saying “fine” regardless of one’s true condition allows everyone to conduct their business as efficiently as possible so that they can devote their energies to more important tasks like daytime TV or heavy drinking.

However, occasionally you run into a situation in which someone has provided you with entirely too little information. For example, this week a good friend of mine received an e-mail from a mutual friend that went something like this.

Hi -----

I got your e-mail. I’ve been really busy lately with the police. Crashed the car.

Later,
-----
WTF! This is not an appropriate amount of information to convey. What does “busy with the police” mean? How did he crash the car in question? Are the two incidents related? We initially thought that we would receive more information when the mutual friend had more time to respond. After all, he was “busy with the police.” I don’t know from personal experience but I would have to assume being busy with the police is a little more difficult to remedy than being busy with decoupage or being busy because you are talking to your mother or something. You probably can’t tell the police that your cell phone is about to die so you have to make this conversation quick. We waited another three days and received … nothing! Apparently he thought that his e-mail comprehensively answered the question “what’s up?” I wholeheartedly disagreed and spent part of today finding his e-mail address so I could see if he needed any help. On the bright side, e-mailing my friend and then writing about e-mailing my friend has distracted me for about 45 minutes. I think I can now return to productivity for another few hours before calling it a day. Score.

So now I am wasting time for real

It's on, baby! No more half-assed wasting time. Now I am going to waste some serious time. Entire hours will pour into this black hole of a blog instead of the mere minutes I was able to waste viewing other people's blogs. This is going to be sweet.

Why am I wasting time? It's simple; my dissertation sucks. You probably knew this already if you read the description of this site or my profile, but the point is worth reiterating. In fact, I'll say it a third time (in caps). MY DISSERTATION SUCKS.

To be fair, the problem is not so much that the topic of my dissertation sucks or that the information I will eventually convey in the paper is not of value; it is more of an issue of process. The process of completing my dissertation is boring in the extreme. If prisoners of war were compelled to work on my dissertation it would violate the standards of conduct endorsed by the Geneva Convention. If given a choice between working on my dissertation for a day or watching 24 uninterrupted hours of the PAX network any sane person would say "bring on Diagnosis Murder. Its party time!" Working on my dissertation is truly, terrifically boring.

All the while I have been struggling with this albatross around my neck I have had occasion to wonder, "how exactly did I get here?" In high school I was your typical good student who nursed a well-hidden rebellious streak. In college I was a typical rebel who wasn't quite rebellious enough to compromise his academic progress. Now both seem like fraudulent identities and yet I can't seem to come up with an alternative. Maybe this blog is intended to help with this search, or maybe it is here just to entertain others with the ridiculous crap that happens to my circle of eccentric friends and me. I guess I'll find out in time.
One other note ... some of you who may occasionally visit this blog (assuming anyone visits) know my name. Please don't use it in comments. I can't have my patients looking me up to see what I do in my spare time, and my name is unusual enough that google is remarkably effective at finding me. THX.