What do you do when you feel yourself starting to want to make bad decisions?
Do you ever find yourself sitting back looking at your life, and noticing how splendidly it is all rolling along, and suddenly think “Wow I really wish I could _____ (insert a stupid act that would jeapordize something good about your life)”? Or perhaps if your not as obsessively overanalytical as I am it comes in as more of a retroactive assessment of an act you’ve just commited. i.e. “Shit why did I do that? That was really stupid. Things were going really well.”
This is all quite abstract and ridiculous–I know…but it is a concept I’ve been tossing around the last couple of days. I feel like spicing things up. I feel like getting dirty. I feel like screwing something up.
Suggestions anyone?
(yep, symptoms have arrived)
September 27th, 2006
Last year I spent a great deal of time from early October though until mid-January determining that I seemed to have Seasonal Affective Disorder.
A summary of what this means might look a bit like this:
1. apparently the winter blues hit me a little (read: alot) harder than they do most people
2. during the winter my desire to sleep increases like crazy as does my desire to eat incredable amounts of straight carbs
3. for a short period in the spring and fall I can expect to be relatively hyperactive
So the story goes that I think I am coming to the end of the hyperactive period. Damn it felt good. Seriously.
The last couple of days haven’t been quite so great. It’s getting a little bit harder for me to get my body to agree with me when I suggest it might be time to get out of bed (or move at all). I’m starting to get “damn I’m tired” headaches. I can ever so slightly feel that sense of being asleep on my feet as I go about certain tasks, and I’ve started falling asleep in class (I know I know, falling asleep in class is normal. …but we’re talking conking out and dreaming during a fully interesting lecture!).
So tonight when my roommates and I were down in the basement I brought my super duper 10,000 Lux Bright Light Therapy System, which I will probably start using some time in the next week or so.
I imagine, think, hope that this year is going to be alot better. I believe (in part out of necessity) that it will. I know what to expect, I can identify the symptoms–if only for those reasons this year will be differant.
That is all 
Bring on fall leaves.
So find a sweater
And you’ll be better
Until the kindling is tinder dry
We can be quiet
As we walk down
To see the graveyard
Where they are now
I wonder how
They brought their piano
To holdene hill
From old berlin
Be hard to keep it
It well in tune
With winters like the one
That’s coming soon
Cause auntumn’s here, autumn’s here
It’s time to cry now
That autumn’s here,autumn’s here, autumn’s
It’s ok if you want to cry
Because autumn’s here
I think that ghosts like
The cooler weather
When leaves turn colour
They get together
And walk along ways
These old back roads
Where no one lives and
And no one goes
With all their hopes set
On the railway
That never came and
that no one stayed
I guess that autumn
Gets you remembering
And the smallest things
Just make you cry.
Autumn’s here, autumn’s here, autumn’s here that autumn’s here
Autumn’s here, it’s time to cry
Cause autumn’s here ooooooo
Autumn’s here, autumn’s here
It’s ok now, cause autumn’s heeeere
woooooo wooooo
–hawksley
September 25th, 2006
So I’ve finally posted some pictures again–like this one of my old room–and quite a few of my new roomies. Hop over n’ check ‘em out.
September 22nd, 2006
There is a vast disconnect between the type of thinking that we are trained for in the public school system and the type of thinking that is expected of us in real life. In problem solving research in psychology the distinction is explained by the terms ‘well-defined problems’ and ‘ill-defined problems’.
In school we are given very well defined problems. Even the most complicated question about a train departing Chicago at 6am travelling at 80km per hour while another train departs New York at….(you get the idea), is very well defined. It may be difficult, but you have all the information you need, and once you’ve gone through the relevant math course you know the steps you need to apply. The difficult part is staying focused, and applying the steps without making any mistakes.
Real life is full of a differant kind of problem. Real life is full of very ill defined problems. “Get a good job”. “Find a life partner”. “Be a good person”. “Put together a report on XYZ”. These are problems we haven’t been trained for. They are problems that don’t have prescribable answers. They are the big real, important kinds of problems.
And yet when we sat down in class for problem solving, over and over again, what did we do?
“Class Susie has 5 oranges, and she gives 3 oranges to Sam. How many…”
I have encountered these ideas repeatedly in my courses with Dr. John Vervaeke. John is the academic director at a private highschool where he’s trying to apply knowledge gained in psychology research in teaching methods
September 21st, 2006
“Computers are incredably fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.”
September 6th, 2006