I've been in complete and miserable cat withdrawal since August, when the Maine coon cat next door moved away to live on a farm. This was the sweetest cat on earth; he would place his thumbed paws on my face before he shoving his nose into my hair. He'd always sit on my deck chair and meow at me through the window all night long. He had a sort of chirp that sounded like speech. Once he leapt directly into my screen, thinking it wasn't there. I'd be all for cloning if it made me another Rocky (am I even joking? Who knows?).

Anyway, I went on a run today to blow off some steam (blowing off steam is the only time I ever run) and as I re-entered this filthy rich area of Boulder from the mountain parks area, I saw a white cat running towards me from the porch of some giant house with, like, turrets and a castle balcony or something. The cat was long-haired, but it had been shaved around the midsection so it resembled a poodle. Despite this outrageous ridiculousness, it had a serene and determined look to it. I saw, when he got closer, that he had blue eyes.

For some reason, I remember, when I was a kid, reading in (of all places) a Babysitters Club book, that white cats with blue eyes tend to be deaf. This cat seemed to be so, but all he wanted was to get neck-scratches for approximately a million hours.

This was near the Mountain Parks, so of course, dogs were walking by constantly. Whenever a dog came down the street, the cat would cease blissfully rubbing against my legs and trot over to investigate it. This thoroughly unsettled most of the dogs. The dogs were used to cats running away, if not immediately, then most certainly after being barked at. Barking had no effect on this cat, of course. The closer the cat got, the more uncertain the dogs' barks became, until finally, the dogs would stop, sort of half-rear up, and shy away, dragging their owners backwards.

Sometimes a dog and the cat would get so close as to touch noses, and only then would the dog freak out. "I just touched noses with a cat!" it would appear to be screaming. "Get me out of here!"

I had to do some serious weaving to keep the cat from following me home, and a horrible, cat-stealing part of me wanted him to follow me home. I can't wait for a cat-allowing landlord - or homeownership - whichever comes first.

It has snowed four times this fall already and I'm starting to think that, this year, trees are idiots. Usually at the first snow, trees will dump their leaves because they know if they don't, their boughs will bow down uncomfortable with the weight of snow and soaking leaves, pulling the trunk into an awkward slouchy hunch, and eventually breaking, leaving the tree ever closer to death. Right? If all of that was bound to happen to you if you didn't let go of your leaves... wouldn't you just let go of the damn leaves?

Not this year. Every time it snows, the trees are like, "Well it's only September/October, so my eyes (feeling sensors) must be deceiving me. I must be hallucinating. Therefore I shall keep all my leaves! And maybe turn them red, but definitely not let them fall!"

The most recent snow, the one that hasn't really stopped yet as of right now, has dumped at least a foot of snow. The trees all look like gnarled old men, hanging onto their leaves stubbornly with old withered fingers. They dangle their branches mere feet from the sidewalk, sodden and pendulous. Anyone over 4 feet tall has to walk in the street or else become ensnared in vindictive tangles.

As the trees get dumber, squirrels get smarter. Any squirrel who's still alive must be. I was walking home from the grocery store with branches grabbing my hair and wrapping themselves around my backpack, and I saw a little rise in the snow with a big tunnel in it. I stopped to look down into the tunnel, and saw that at the bottom was (or had once been) a topless pumpkin. A squirrel was curled up in the bottom of the pumpkin, fat and sleeping. He had clearly been eating his nice warm home.

There are situations in which I think I must have mild Aspergers or some similar social-misunderstanding disorder. Usually immediately after I think this, I chide myself for diagnosing myself with an easy excuse instead of simply accepting that I am socially awkward and have the capability to change it.

Do I have the capability to change it? As time goes on, I get less certain. The way people respond to me is entirely at odds with how I think they should, and how they perceive me, when asked, is entirely at odds with how I perceive myself. Up until now I sort of thought that I just had an expressionless face that tended towards looking annoyed and so people just figured I wasn't interested (in them, in anything). But lately I've been making a concerted effort. To smile longer than I think is appropriate, to look people in the eye even though it's supremely uncomfortable for me, to act excited and bubbly when the situation seems to call for it.

None of it makes a difference. I suspect that smiling becomes grimacing, eye contact becomes staring, excited becomes manically excitable, and bubbly becomes bubbling over. All without my knowledge, because I can't see myself through a normal person's eyes. I can honestly say I have no fucking clue what draws people to one another (conversely, what repels them from one another). Or even what looks merely normal and acceptable.

I had a meeting with a professor the other day and she noted that I seem 'blunt and straightforward - a scientific approach - but very impatient'. Another professor noted today that I am 'clearly introverted'. When I first started working for the graduate student I am still working for, she asked me if I was nervous about sixty times.

These attributes: quirky, yes, maybe even nerdy, but abnormal enough for most people to react as though they think I hate them?

I'm sitting in a hallway with my laptop deciding my future, and knowing what I know about mood-dependent decision making, it's terrifying. You choose a graduate program when you're tired and you end up with something way easier than is necessary, that requires something like a 1.5 GPA and a recommendation letter from your mom, whose coursework consists of memorizing PowerPoint bullets and learning how to write five paragraph essays. You choose a graduate program when you've just read a scholarly paper by your very favorite genius and you'll probably overestimate how much mindbreaking research you're willing to withstand in order to get to his/her level. Then you end up with a program you, A) can't get into, if you're lucky, or B) requires the kind of critical thinking where you have to have completely unique, perfect, and experiment-ready ideas coming out of your mouth/falling onto paper constantly, or else you fail as a human being.

It's somewhat ironic that I'm considering all of this given that the chosen graduate program has to include, at least in part, the further study of mood-dependent decision making. Maybe my thesis could be on how graduate students are only in the program I'm in because they had were in X mood at the time of their application process. That'd be totally meta of me and I hope someone would metaphorically kick me in the face.

Five years ago I would have said (and did say) that I would like to drop out of the unrelenting escalator march of scholarly/professional progress (be born, get educated, get more educated, get a job that may or may not have something to do with what you got educated in, have kids, get rich, get richer, still be unsatisfied, get old, get bored) and just get on a plane, go abroad, travel around, and forget about striving.

I don't know if I ever posted this here. I think I did on my old diary. But just in case, here is something I wrote in my private journal sophomore year of college, September 2003:

Don’t ever let me forget that we had this conversation.

‘I just... the hardest part about leaving would be doing it alone,’ he says.

There is silence in the back of the bus because I’m deciding whether to say it and mean it, mean it through and through.

‘Nick, if you were to actually do it,’ I say, slowly, deliberately, ‘I would go with you.’

His face is suddenly lit. ‘Would you?’

‘I...’

‘Would you really?’

My eyes are tearing up.

‘Let’s do it, then,’ he whispers.

We spend the whole rest of the day in a planning daze, a fear-purging daze... overall, it’s a harsh daze. The first few minutes are the hardest. We want to say everything at once. Our parents, and what they would think. (His dad would be angry. My dad would be disappointed, but not angry. My mother would be furious just because she never had the guts to do it herself.) We can’t leave our roommates in the lurch. We can’t waste the money already spent on tuition for the semester. We can’t...

So it’s decided; the beginning of next year. The Bound stops at Valmont. ‘Next year we’re going to have forgotten we had this conversation,’ I say to him as we stand up.

‘Yeah,’ he says, and then shakes his head. ‘No, we can’t forget.’

‘We can’t forget,’ I say, putting my hand on his shoulder.

‘We won’t,’ he says.

‘See, it’s going to be so much easier for you,’ I say.

‘Why?’

‘Because you’ve got the first step done already.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Getting rid of all your stuff.’

‘Oh.’

Silence.

‘But then the next step, what’s that?’ he asks.

‘The next step is being able to let everyone you love go.’

‘The South American jungle,’ he exclaims, walking past a field of weeds in North Boulder.

‘Not the jungle,’ I say.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s the jungle. We can’t survive in the jungle. We’ll die.’

‘So?’

‘When you put it that way...’

‘I’d rather die in the jungle than die in this fucking place.’

I look sideways at him. He never swears. ‘Plus,’ I say, sweeping past this, ‘I don’t want to live somewhere where there aren’t any other people.’

‘Me,’ he says.

‘Other than you.’

‘No offense,’ I rush on, seeing his face, ‘but I cannot spend that much time with anyone for that

long a period of time without killing them.’

He laughs.

‘I can’t,’ I say, shrugging.

‘I can,’ he says.

‘A boat,’ he exclaims, turning the corner from Valmont to Edgewater. ‘We’ll live on a boat in the ocean. No property taxes on the surface of the water!’

‘Oh no no no no. I can’t stand water. No water. No.’

‘What?’

‘You know that. I can’t swim. I get seasick. I hate water. No.’

‘You don’t have to swim. Plus, we’ll get all our food needs met.’

‘No we fucking won’t, we’ll...’

‘Oh yeah, I guess we can’t eat any fruit. I guess we’d probably get scurvy.’

‘I don’t want to get scurvy.’

‘You don’t want to get scurvy?’ He laughs, looks askance at me.

‘No, I don’t want to get scurvy.’

‘Thailand,’ he says, walking past a Thai restaurant.

‘Something my dad once told me,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘We were in London, on the subway, passing all these bums begging and no one was giving them anything... they were really in a bad way. He said, ‘You can knock Communism all you want, but they feed their people, and they medicate their people. In Beijing I saw no one begging on the streets, no one.’’

‘No beggars?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘China, then,’ he says.

‘The hardest thing would be leaving Patrick,’ he says.

‘Financially or personally?’ I ask.

‘I... financially,’ he says.

‘The thing is, I’m so scared,’ he mumbles, too quietly almost.

‘What? What of?’

‘I’m scared I won’t make it. I’m scared I won’t know how to survive.’

‘If you couldn’t survive you’d come back.’

‘...........’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says.

‘Well, you don’t have to worry about that yet.’

‘I don’t know if I’d come back,’ he says again.

We’re sitting in the fast food Japanese restaurant when the ridiculousness hits me. ‘Nick, in a year you won’t even be the same person,’ I say. ‘You know what I mean? Do you know how often you change your mind? Every two days, it’s...’

‘I know,’ he says, unexpectedly.

‘You do?’

‘Yeah. I mean, yeah. I guess.... I guess I have to find myself in a situation which is open to change.’

‘Maybe..’

‘School isn’t that situation.’

‘No.’

He spoons chopstickfuls and chopstickfuls of rice and eel into his mouth before he continues. ‘If fear of leaving school does get the best of me, at least... I’ll always know there’s something small in the back of my head telling me that school just isn’t right.’

That’s not enough, I say in my head as we leave the restaurant. Because I was telling him earlier that every plan made by Camille and I in high school, every road trip, every hitchhiking jaunt to Canada, every backpacking trip around Europe, has fallen through every summer because Camille’s parents ‘won’t let her’.

‘Fuck that,’ he says, ‘just don’t tell them! Just leave! Write from an internet cafe and just say... ‘Mom, I’m in Europe.’

‘I know. I know. All I’m saying is... every summer the plans fell through because of her and her parents. Every summer I was totally ready.’

‘I...’

‘What I’m saying is this: if this falls through, it will not be because of me.’

‘It won’t?’

‘No.’

‘So what you’re saying is it’ll be because of me.’

‘Yes.’

He crunches a few leaves in his path. ‘Sweet,’ he says, after a length.

This was three years pre-Indonesia. Nick and I hadn't yet started dating. I loved him, though. It was already getting impossible to hide it. And this conversation stuck, gluelike and word for word, to my brain, long enough for me to practically transcribe it, because merely the thought of leaving the country with him and surviving on coconuts was enough to make my mind and body light up. Logic and reason were completely suppressed, my disdain for something even as wimpy as car-camping was totally wiped out, and for awhile all I dreamed about was dropping out of society with him.

And in a way, we ended up eventually doing so. We weren't as crafty and revolutionary as we'd hoped; we both got degrees first. We got jobs at retail establishments. And when we did leave the country, we made sure we had jobs lined up and housing set. By then, the novelty of his thrill-seeking personality had worn thin on me and I had returned to being the drab realist that I am naturally.

But even stepping out of the mold of career-striving was a huge step sideways, and not easy for me to do. I am happy I did it. I think. If only because now, when I get an errant thought about how I'd like to drop out of society and move abroad, I actually have a living breathing picture in my head about what that's like. I don't have an idyllic (and totally false) image of waking up every morning to swaying palms and a clear head with no worries in the world, and Nick bringing me a coconut he just climbed a palm to pick, to eat for breakfast before we began our carefree day of frolicking in the ocean.

Here is a longer diary entry from December 2007, from Indonesia.

We start out sitting half-buried in bright green beach vines. Or at least that's where it feels like we start out. Start out, finish, everything else. World without end, bright green beach vines and a measured, heavy silence.

If time had started here we would have wandered off in two separate directions and gone on to lead two entirely separate lives, and we wouldn't have thought twice about it. We, or I, at least, wouldn't have wondered what his hands would look like once I'd turned my back on them, whether they'd be clutching each other in his lap or lazily tracing sand-roads around the cities of wild dogprints. I wouldn't have wondered whether he was staring after me or already in the water, trying to surf on an old piece of driftwood. We would have just gone as if neither of us were more to the other than strangers passing on the street, heads down and feet flying, in a big city like New York or Chicago.

Time didn't start here, though. Time, this time, started somewhere further away and entirely different. And because it did, I do wonder these things, or I would if I tried to run away, so instead of moving, I stay buried.

The vines are soft and slippery in my fingers, the sun is hot, and I want to be buried in sand. "Do you want to bury each other?" I ask him.

"What do you mean, bury each other?"

"I mean bury each other. In the sand. Under that palm?"

"Well, definitely not under that palm, a coconut might fall."

"That palm's not bearing coconut. You see any coconuts up there?"

"No, but that doesn't mean there aren't any."

"Okay. Fine. Let's bury each other under some other tree. Something that's not a palm. How about over there?"

"No. Forget it."

"If you didn't want to, why didn't you just say so?"

"I think I just did."

Sometimes when he says things like this I wish his eyes were tired, that he had spent the morning throwing up, or corralling seventeen screaming children, or climbing mountains; anything to make it seem like it's not personal, that he's just exhausted, can't move to do anything strenuous. That otherwise, he would be thrilled to bury me in sand. Teach me to bodysurf. Paint designs on our bodies, orange, with spit-damp ochre.

But his eyes aren't tired; they're bright and lively and looking somewhere else. Without saying a word, he stands up and walks away.

"Where are you going?" I ask the air around me, and the humidity swallows my words down with a gurgle, spits them back at me as a thin sheen of sweat. Drops of it form on my fingertips and I look at them, my words, and then look up and see that he's already dragging a piece of driftwood into the waves.

The real pain of it is in the fact that this is the kind of landscape that makes you want to be with the love of your life, and if you happen not to be, to want to turn whoever you're with into the love of your life, even if it would never work out, or, as the case may be, if it has already worked out and then fallen badly apart. The beach is ridged and pockmarked with birds' claws and dogs' paws, with the occasional spreading surface of clam or conch shells, and the scuttle and bubble of hermit crabs surfacing and submerging with the waves. The sand is black and silver and white and completely smooth, blending into a bay on one side and a mountain on the other. Over the mountain, which is flat-topped and appears covered in thick green cotton, a thundercloud has been looming for hours, motionless and far enough away as to be effectively harmless, but still gorgeous. The sun is directly overhead and filtering through the palms, which every few minutes drop a coconut – plop! crack! – into the sand or onto a log or – splash! – into the creek. The plops and cracks and splashes, the crash of the waves, the crowing of the roosters, the shouts of the villagers calling their dogs off of someone's pigs, and the ever-present wind hissing and whistling over the ocean – this is the island's wind ensemble, its quintet.

It is best heard, I think, doing something quirky. Burying someone up to the neck in black smooth sand, then sculpting an entirely new body for them out of the surrounding sand, perhaps with shell necklaces, squiggly arms, rolls of grainy hip fat, or large froglike toes. Spending hours sitting motionless in a dry sea of hermit crabs, waiting for one to venture far enough from its hole to be captured in an impossibly swift arm scoop. Realizing that no matter how far a hermit crab travels from its hole, it can still return faster than a human arm can move. Floating in the shallow ebb of the shore and relinquishing all control, letting the ocean do with you what it pleases, whether what it pleases is a rough slam into the sand bar or a languid, dizzy turn miles down the beach to the reef.

There is time for this. The background is perfect for it, and while some people may fantasize about drinking pina coladas while laying in hammocks reading the most terrible romance novel they can get their hands on, what I'm wishing for is to be able to act like the most curious of children with my lover.

But he's in the ocean with his driftwood, tumbling over and over into the riptide, and he, I'm sure, is wishing he were entirely alone. Maybe even the only person for hundreds and hundreds of miles. That's how he is. It's not how he used to be, but it's how he is now.

I no longer think going somewhere as far away as I can fly will fundamentally change who I am. Or how my relationships go. Or make anything less complicated.

That helps.

The older I get the more anhedonic I get, and I'm not just using that word because it's a GRE word; in fact, when that word popped up on my GRE Vocab Builder, I was like, sweet, I already know that one. I am that one.

Well, not completely. I shouldn't be so damn dramatic all the time and start journal entries off with sweeping proclamations that I know in the back of my brain to be at least a tiny bit untrue. I am not incapable of feeling pleasure. But I am more incapable of it than I used to be, for sure.

However, this is possibly because I spend 80% of my time doing things like the GRE Vocab Builder, or brush-up algebraic equations, or papers on actuarial decision making, or internet homework about cellular respiration. I guess we'll see how true the sweeping proclamation really is once we have a point of comparison. That point of comparison will have to be something like, let's see how I feel once I spend most of my time traveling to foreign countries, trying every expensive exotic food that exists, frolicking in ocean waves, playing with kittens, and counting my oodles and oodles of hundred dollar bills that fall in my lap from nowhere.

When I dream about people I've never met, which is actually quite often, my brain never bothers to fill in their faces. It doesn't do this by having the person walk around with a blur for a face, as that might impact the quality of the dream by being really creepy (and if it was really creepy every time I dreamt about someone I've never met, I'd never meet anybody new). No, it does this by having my eyes aimed downwards, or otherwise away from them, at all times during the dream.

Last night I had one where I was in the process of falling in love with someone I'd just met, and had never met before. We stared out my living room window at the hot dog stand that filled the view, but ate leftover potato latkes. I had salted his too heavily, and he made a face when he took a bite, so I salted my side even heavier, took an even bigger bite, made an even weirder face, and started laughing. We both started laughing. And my hand, which was pretending to hand him back the fork, was really searching for an excuse to brush hands, or linger wrist to wrist.

And this whole time my line of sight only saw a hot dog stand, a plate of potato latkes, his legs in his jeans perched on a stool, and his right hand. I never saw anything above chest height.

This is odd because in waking life I often focus on people's faces to the complete exclusion of everything else. It's as though faces are so important to me that my brain doesn't feel right inventing them in case it's proven wrong later and has to painfully recalibrate every time the flesh-and-blood person walks into a real, physical room.

We were at the Niwot Market today to eat Sachi Sushi after 4 hours of sleep and most of it being spent inside a 100 degree stuffy room. I wanted to get a notebook for school (tomorrow, because clearly I plan ahead) after we had already paid and walked out.

"Shit," I said, "we gotta go to Target", because 'shit' is the perfect expression for realizing that one has to go to Target the day before fall semester starts at a giant college with 30,000 students, "and our ice cream is going to melt!"

Dan told me to hang on and he'd just go get a notebook from the Niwot Market, to which I yelled at his receding back: "There isn't a notebook section at a grocery store!!" but lo and behold, there was.

I haven't had this back-to-school elementary school style feeling since, well, elementary school. Something about a new notebook. A five subject one! I used my neatest handwriting to title each section with the course name, time, and location as though my penmanship would be graded by my fifth grade teacher. I think my handwriting was actually neater in fifth grade.

Last semester I would take my laptop to class and take notes that way, but I found myself falling into the trap that I loathe in other people: surfing the net and blanking out. The prospect of net-surfing is way too instant-gratification for me to have available in class, so this semester it's pen and paper only.

Five classes + research lab + senior honors thesis = the excuse I've always wanted to totally immerse myself in learning... also known as nerd-dom... also known as paradise.

The more restaurant reviews I write, the more of a strange phenomenon emerges from the fog.

As much as I've always believed and defended my position that food quality is way, way more important than ambience, service, plate decoration, the art on the wall, or whatever else some people judge restaurants on, I find myself sometimes being pulled subconsciously towards giving some restaurant with worse food better reviews that it deserves simply for the food alone, and vice versa. "I just like it better for some reason!" I'll think to myself, and then I'll have to consciously throw that thought away to try and be fair.

Then I wonder if that's the atmosphere (wall hangings, service, you get the picture) creeping in and trying to influence me under the radar without getting judged by my snobby, food-obsessed, conscious mind!

Because consciously, I will go (and have gone) back to restaurants that are gaudy and ugly with uncomfortable stools and loud patrons and just plain mean waitresses who make fun of my clothes with other waitresses behind my back, if the food is fantastic. I wouldn't want to admit doing it the other way around... going back to a place with so-so food just because there's intricate art on all the walls or the waitress and I squealed together about some shared experience or the seats were all lush, plush love seats.

But then how to explain my urge to return to somewhere like the Dushanbe Teahouse, which has consistently proved its food to be so-so at best and awful at worst? Is it just because I like the pillowy corner booths and the rush of the creek alongside the tables outdoors and the fact that 40 Tajik artists painstakingly handcrafted it in Tajikistan and as a result it looks like this? How so shallow and easily fooled, foodie brain? No matter how many times I look at my review and think 'No! This place sucks, remember?' there's a creeping desire in me that hisses, evilly, 'It can't be that bad... it's so beautiful and everyone in Boulder loves it. Look at its menu. Everything is so ethnic! You love the Teahouse. You love it. There is something wrong with you for giving it a negative review. Go on. Give it just one more try....'

Or how to explain my returning 3 times to Marie's, a mediocre greasy spoon (and what good is a greasy spoon that's mediocre??) whose waitresses gave me the sass that I so dearly missed from Chicago? Did I just think, 'ooh, that's right, Marie's waitresses, bathe me in your sweet disdain! I love it when you imply that I'm stupid! Serve me whatever crappy food you wish!' and promptly forget that the food isn't worth it?

These examples are easy enough to deconstruct, but there are little niggling feelings that tug at me when I'm trying to sort out how many stars a restaurant deserves that I can't as easily desconstruct. I sit down at a restaurant some place and just immediately for no reason think, 'This place is going to blow, I can tell!' and even if it turns out not to, I just don't want to give it a good rating. There's something trying to stop me!

I try my hardest to ignore this feeling and be fair to the poor restaurant, and I think that I usually succeed. It's just obnoxious that I can't put my finger on what it is that's trying to influence me. Something subtle about the smell? That it reminds me on some level of someplace I had an anxiety attack in when I was in high school? Did I just happen to feel sick that day? Was I mad at my boyfriend?

It makes me question the validity of all the reviews I read, not just my own. As Ryan pointed out in the comments on my last entry, my reviews roughly follow a bell curve. I didn't do it on purpose. That's just how I feel about most places - most places are average. More are a little bit to one side or another. And only a few are exceptional, whether exceptionally good or exceptionally puke-inducing.

I am the only Yelp reviewer I've come across, though, whose reviews fall like that. Most everyone else has tons of 5 and 4 star reviews and they fall off as the stars get lower. Is this just because I tend sort of towards melancholy and judgment, and the rest of these people are happy-go-lucky and tends towards enjoyment and fun? Or is it because I see a three star review as a place worth going back to and they see it as a horrible, unforgivable smite upon some hardworking small business? Or is it, perhaps, because they take into account the decoration, the service, the ambience, and notice all these small pleasures I'd never think to find because I'm too busy staring with a critical eye at my plate?

In case you were worried about my red X's, people, worry no more, because I have been keeping the red X's at bay by reviewing practically every business establishment in Boulder over at Yelp.com. A link to my reviews can be found on my left sidebar all the way at the bottom, in case you are the type of person who enjoys reading a snobby judgmental person hurl thorns at helpless small business owners.

I trust most of you are aware of the Milgram experiment (or the most well known thereof), but if you haven't, there's a Wikipedia link right there, just ripe for clicking! It's a pretty oft-cited defense of the power of authority/peer pressure/obedience etc., but the more I read about it, the more it seems like we're all missing the point. Hasn't anyone taken into consideration that the people subjected to this experiment have no doubt noticed that their experimenter is himself willing to subject other subjects to 45o volt shocks?

I think it may have been pure brute selfish fear, a better-him-than-me thing, that motivated these poor subjects, way more than just the human desire to acquiesce to authority. I mean, the experimenter clearly thinks it's okay to dangerously shock people. There's nothing that would suggest he would stop at dangerously shocking any dissenter in the experiment.

My psychology text has cleverly anticipated my excuse response by citing predictions, percentages, studies, surveys, and basically good hard raw facts and proof, that prove that no matter how much people deny that they would have done it, they would have definitely done it.

Though my text has discredited me before I even opened my mouth, I do think I would have refused to administer any more shocks until the experimenter at least made a threatening move or comment. And threatening means... threatening. Not, 'you have no choice but to continue'. That isn't a threat, it's an arguable statement that begs to be asked for clarification. But while this may be just my gut reaction/excuse for disassociating myself from these subjects, I feel like, yes, I would have done it in that case, but it wouldn't have been out of fear of disobeying authority. It would have been out of a fear OF GETTING SHOCKED WITH 450 VOLTS OF ELECTRICITY.

Half An Interview

: I'm sorry I'm late.

: They don't? I'm surprised. Who? No, no, don't actually tell me. I mean, I'm at least 45 minutes late and we're not Spain, or, I don't know, Thailand, so... that's rude, right? That's rude.

: ::laughs:: It's just how my family raised me.

: I don't know if it's all that unusual. Just because these freakishly talented families who just squirt out one after another after another are so high profile, doesn't mean that the majority of us just sort of come out of nowhere. I don't mean to call them nowhere, of course. But as you said, my mom's a dentist and my dad's a kindergarten teacher. We didn't even have a TV in the house, actually. The first movie I saw was 'Home Alone', I was 6, it was at a friend's house, and I stopped watching it after the kid threw up pizza. That was just gross. You remember that scene? Almost on grossness par with Tom Hanks puking into his astronaut helmet in Apollo 13. Oh God, I'm sure it's not actually called an astronaut helmet. I just can't remember the right term. But the splattering like it was going to come out of the screen... anyway, I walked out of that one too. Right out of the theatre and sank to my knees in the hallway.

: No, I obviously have a serious phobia of throwing up.

: In Ladies? That was a body double.

: Yes.

: Yes, I really got a body double to puke for me. Why would I lie about that? Actually - am I allowed to say this? I'm sure I am - it wasn't real, anyway. It was oatmeal. With honey and egg or something. Just spitting it up while fake gagging. But still. Couldn't do it. In fact, I don't watch that scene in the movie.

: Okay, good idea. I agree.

: I didn't. I wasn't one of those kids who declares they want to act from, I don't know, straight out of the womb, and then joins all the theater groups in school and gets to play Macbeth or the equivalent thereof for the rest of their secondary school career. I didn't actually act until college.

: No, I should amend that, actually. I didn't act formally until college. When I was a kid I pretended I was different people all the time. My longest standing character, created, I think, when I was four, had emigrated from Russia, played the xylophone proficiently, and spoke an invented-on-the-spot language that sounded nothing like Russian. But I think they don't call that acting. I think they call that lying.

: Of course I didn't! That was the fun of it. But you're good. My mother said that to me once. She said, 'if you want to tell stories, that's fine, but just make sure to tell us they're stories afterwards so we don't worry.' Of course, I listened, and nodded, and then ran off and did not listen to her advice because seriously, what's the point in telling stories if people know they're fake so they can relax? You want to draw people in. You want their real emotions and their real reactions. Or else it's 'that's a great story, sweetie!' instead of 'Holy $#!&, you saw WHAT? Are you okay?' There's a difference. There's a huge difference. Especially to a kid and especially to an actor. Oh, can you write 'holy $#!&' in this magazine? Oh well, too late if you can't.

: In fictional movies? We do the exact opposite. I mean, yes, of course, it's a movie and it's classified as fiction or nonfiction, so its packaging is an inherent caveat. Sort of like saying, 'Mom, this is going to be a lie.' But as soon as people are past the packaging, once they're in the theatre or at home in front of their televisions with the DVD inserted, our very first goal, our first and most important goal, is to make people forget the packaging, and forget the label. Forget we ever said 'Mom, this is a lie.' We want them to believe with every synapse in their brain that this is reality, that it's actually happening. That every occurrence on the screen will impact their world. If Yellowstone does erupt, for example, you know, onscreen, we want people rushing to their underground shelters with Saltines in hand before they realize what they're doing.

: I would. I would absolutely support the idea of people running in droves out of the theatre to take shelter. And not just because they'd have to buy another ticket later when they realized what they'd done. ::laughs::

: No, I think any director's ideal is to achieve that level of realism. Maybe I'm wrong.

: Well, I'm grown up now, but more to the point, everyone knows who I am. I can't make up pasts for myself. I can't say that something happened to me when it didn't. There'd be hundreds - thousands - of people who knew me at some point in my life stepping forward and testifying against me. Well, not testifying. I don't mean to infuse this with such unnecessary gravity. Because obviously, it's not like it's a human right to have the freedom to lie to people whenever you want.

: On the contrary, actually. Sometimes, after acting in scenes where everything's so carefully scripted to be clever, or momentous, or hilarious - real life starts failing to measure up. I mean, no conversation can possibly match a placed plot point in a story. Not every time I talk to a man in a coffeeshop is going to end in a night full of whimsical adventure and mystery. Not any time will. But at the same time, not every time I walk to the bus stop is going to end with my getting pulled, unwillingly, into a murder scheme which puts my life in danger and, ultimately, gets my organs harvested in a bathtub. Not any time will. Hopefully.

: But do you know what I mean? Everything you do when you're not acting starts seeming flat. It starts to seem like it's the unreal part. That it's filler. And that's not a good feeling. Because even though it doesn't feel like it sometimes, the filler is the majority. I mean, I'm sitting here, calling real life filler, instead of, you know... real life.

: No, I wouldn't call it depressed, per se. I might call it dread, but that's being extremely pessimistic about it, and you sort of pointed me in that direction. See, as I get older, the filler may slowly become everything. Because no one can maintain the same level of frenetic working as they age. Even though of course, I'd prefer to. I'd prefer to always be speaking some perfect line of script, or else, at least, to always be a pawn in someone else's grand scheme. But right now... you know, most people who would refer to their real life as 'filler' have nothing else to escape into. Real life is real life and that's their everyday experience, every second of every day. And yeah, I'd call them depressed.

: You mean it's not immediately obvious?

: Of course. Well, the reason I'm different is because my real life also consists of these scripted moments and schemes. Just because it's meant to be a fabricated story doesn't mean I'm not physically doing it. A great percentage of my life actually is spent contributing to these fantastic stories and feeling for all the world like I'm influencing them. I don't have that 'every second of my life having to be my own life' thing going on. If that makes sense.

: I don't know if dramatic scenes are something that someone can stop expecting to just happen. I don't know that I'll ever shake the feeling that my words, the way they come out naturally, will never be as good as a sentence some screenplay writer agonized over for weeks. And why should they, anyway? Why should they?

One of the many signs that I have been watching too much Top Model (any Top Model can probably be argued to be too much Top Model, but we'll leave that aside) is that last night I had a dream about Tyra Banks going on a murderous rampage on a city bus, which culminated in the stabbing of my boyfriend. She stood up on the bus driver's driving platform as the faceless driver cowered. I escaped out the emergency exit, a swing-out window, as she shrieked and brandished a long knife. Dan wasn't so lucky. As only one leg was out of the bus, she teetered towards the back in her ridiculous high heels and stabbed him in the throat.

The scene cut, because dream scenes can just cut, to us in someone's backyard. He was in a yard chair, bleeding from the mouth, though with no outward signs of the stabbing except that. I was reaching my hand through molasses to find my cell phone to dial 911. Although it was in my pocket, my pocket seemed light-years away, and my hand was moving not even close to light speed. And if that weren't enough, the phone, once opened, displayed only vague squigglies that darted around the keypad like tadpoles.

This is why, once I dialed what I thought was 911 and was greeted by a sarcastic guy giving me quiz questions a la bar trivia nights, I thought I might have misdialed, and hung up. But the second time dialing (a repeat, if slower, of the molasses and the space travel and the tadpoles) I got the same guy, and had to dodge his questions before getting down to the case at hand, being, of course, the stabbing, and the blood that was coursing from Dan's mouth onto the preternaturally green grass.

It took the ambulance 20 minutes to show up. I wrote this number down on a pad of paper for future reference: note to self - make sure to always allow 20 minutes before beginning death throes. Oddly enough, I don't remember if he was dead or alive by the time they got there. In the dream, it wasn't material.

Dreams tend to do that. They take things that in life would be of the utmost importance, like whether or not you are wearing clothes, or whether or not there is solid ground beneath you, or whose house you are in, or what country you are in, or whether you even know the person who's currently having sex with you, or whether or not your boyfriend has died from his stab wound, and make them secondary. At the same time, they force you to worry and obsess over the sound of the word 'orange', or whether your teeth might at any time just fall out, or the fact that your fingers are sticking together, or the dinosaur that keeps appearing and disappearing in the long distance.

Honestly, sometimes I just write here out of a fear of a big red X, and sometimes I suspect it's becoming crystal-clear. See, I've been Excel-charting my 5 chart-able New Years resolutions - despite my messy room and unorganized stuff, I like to make pie charts and lists and promises -and the best way for me to ensure that I feel guilty when I don't keep my promises is to have the failure recorded somewhere. (Negative reinforcement, people! The anti-gold star! It works! Screw what those evil child psychologists tell you!) For the last four weeks, I've failed at least one of the five. Usually two. And next to each failed week I insert a ClipArt GIANT RED X. And I have to look at them every time I check up on myself.

Living in fear of more red X's drives me to this page five days a week, and I am not afraid to admit it. But today something else drove me here, and that something is Haruki Murakami. Haruki Murakami is a big tease. He wrote a compelling novel full of dripping imagery and believable, intense relationships. He filled it full of well-placed objects that I THOUGHT would come to be of importance later in the story. He weaved three stories together seamlessly and set the stage up for what I THOUGHT was going to be a climactic symbol crash of all these well-placed objects, relationships, and storylines.

Wrong! Just as I was gearing up to cover my ears and be blown away, THE BOOK ENDED. I spent 7/8 of the book buried in it, ignoring my drivers at work, putting off using the bathroom, making my already too late bedtime later and later. I was spellbound, but also I was reading extra carefully to catch all the details so I wouldn't be confused when everything came together. It read like a detective novel - everything of the utmost importance. Since I'm not used to reading detective novels, I had to teach my brain to read that way.

And then what does Murakami do? He (spoiler, if you can count this ending as a spoiler) ends the book by putting a phone that keeps spewing murderous threats on the shelves of a 7-11, its murderous threats un-carried out. The main character goes home and sleeps next to her sister as the day breaks. Many of the major characters just sort of disappear and we never find out what THEY'RE doing.

Now, I'm actually not a climax junkie. I am perfectly happy with books having no discernable point as long as they're fun to read. But this book was set up like the most climaxy thriller ever. It had the creepy foreboding feeling. The seemingly pointless alternate storylines that you figure must be eventually relevant when they smash into the main storyline at the end. The lurking Chinese mafia (WHO NEVER ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING). All the characters having extremely creepy backstories.

And then... nothing. My cultural parameters have failed to expand wide enough for the Japanese style of storytelling, I imagine many Japanese majors would tell me. Maybe true. But he (Murakami) is still a giant tease.

Yesterday was one of those conflicted days where, hey, it's 67 degrees in early February and you've got three hours to kill. You have your bike. You have your book. But you're really tired. You have a class from 6:30 until 9:30 and then have to work at 6:00 the next morning. What do you do? Bike-ride or nap? Read in the lounge chair of the sunny quadrangle, or nap?

I napped with my window wide open and felt that was a fair compromise. What does Boulder reward me with? A next day even sunnier and warmer than that one, with no obligations to meet and no naps to take! I might go out on a limb here and say that this is the first time that nature has ever rewarded me for being lazy. (Or global warming has just gone on a total rampage with no regard either way for my laziness.)

In non-weather-related blog news (ah, if only ALL blog news could be such!) I am currently having an awkward etiquette problem that I'm pretty sure couldn't even exist until last year at the earliest. See, I'm a Scrabulous junkie (and I continue to call it Scrabulous despite the whole legal kerfluffle with Hasbro, etc) and I've been known to carry on 10 or 12 games at a time, playing them at work while my buses circle placidly around town, evenly spaced and happy.

Now, our network has always blocked Youtube and celebrity gossip rags and porn sites and things of that nature, but never bothered to block Facebook or any of its applications, probably figuring that it was OK if its employees wasted time in innocuous ways. Yesterday, though, Scrabulous (and Facebook) suddenly became blocked. Solidly blocked. Neither switching browsers nor going through tunnel sites nor adding s' to the http's worked at all.

The day before yesterday, I played an exciting, extremely evenly matched game with a stranger. She asked me for a rematch. I accepted and started the game, saying I'd play consistently the following day. Following day comes, Scrabulous is blocked. I can't even get ahold of her via Facebook to tell her what's going on. Having had this happen (players disappearing on me suddenly after starting a game), I know how frustrating this is.

Now my quandary has several solutions, but Miss Manners not having covered Scrabulous etiquette in any of her manuals yet, I can't decide which is the best:

a) Using the Scrabulous chatbox when I get home to apologize for my situation and offer to gallantly resign the game if she chooses not to play a one-move-a-day game;
b) Using the Scrabulous chatbox to apologize for my situation, but expect her to keep playing;
c) Decide to not care because this is the internet and there are assholes on the internet and everyone expects assholes on the internet and besides, Scrabulous games aren't promises signed in gold so I should just play when I wander by my computer and to hell with what she thinks about me because we will never meet; or
d) Demand that our IT guy unblock Scrabulous because my work is on-demand and rare, and the nature of it is that there cannot be extra work, really, so Scrabulous couldn't possibly be affecting my output, and risk being laughed at and having Blogger blocked as well.

Ideas?

Unfortunately, Nora, I am not at all eloquent enough to avoid the virulent '25 Things' list that's catching Facebook and blogs by storm. I simply hadn't been tagged yet. However, I am going to take your comment as a challenge AND a tag, just so I have an excuse to drop the, um, dressing room curtains of propriety or something, and instead fulfill my weekly writing quota by doing something that takes no organizational thought. Thanks for that, by the way! Organizational thought is my Achilles heel!

1. I love to sleep and look forward to it every night. I rarely have nightmares and often have lucid dreams, so closing my eyes in bed at night is usually the start of some great adventure.

2. Having even moderately acceptable posture is a daily struggle.

3. I haven't yet found my massage tolerance limit. That is, I've been massaged for 2 or 3 hours straight, possibly longer, and never stopped wanting more.

4. In my line of work I often encounter people who just wander out to any old random city bus stop and just start asking the driver about how to get to their desired location. The bus is never the correct bus. And they never ever know the address or cross streets of where they're going. They just wander out and expect Providence and kind people to guide them. I do not understand these people. I can't imagine doing that. I am the kind of person who carries bus schedule printouts and writes the addresses of places on my hand as well as on sheets of paper in my pocket.

5. It's easy for me to handle most types of pain. Broken limbs, ear-stretching, cuts, falls. But I can't handle dentist-related tooth nerve pain.

6. I am the only person in my family to have stayed blond past childhood.

7. Everyone who looks at me thinks I'm Swedish, and barring that, some kind of Scandinavian at least. I am not actually Swedish at all. Mostly, I am Russian. Also German and English. but not Swedish.

8. I have a lot of tiny things wrong with me that I should probably go to the doctor for, but never have. My jaw pops when I eat chewy food. My right ear clogs up when I exercise. I've had a cough for 6 months. Sometimes my heart skips beats. Taken individually, they never seem important enough to get checked out.

9. Sushi has been my favorite food ever since I was old enough to eat solid food.

10. I don't like soda. My favorite things to drink are fruit juices and smoothies; the weirder they're combined, the better. My current bizarre favorite is honeydew/avocado with boba.

11. There's never been a time when I haven't liked school. Not even in middle school.

12. I used to be able to improvise on the piano for hours without interruption. Now I'm too self-conscious about it, and too apt to want to record what I'm playing, to be able to do it anymore.

13. Any space I live or work in is guaranteed to be a total mess.

14. My least favorite household chore is doing dishes. I would rather scrub toilets.

15. I like to think I'm awesome at Scrabble, but any time I get too up on my high horse I go to the near-tournament level practice session by my house on Wednesdays. This one guy I teamed up with once literally looked at his tiles, which read 'IWCSEO_', for about half a second, and went, 'Shall we play 'COWRIES', or 'COWIEST'? I am not at this level and don't understand how one even gets there.

16. I am a terrible swimmer and can barely do two laps without feeling like I'm going to drown. But I love beaches and cavorting around in waves in the ocean.

17. I get sad when I have to be inside during an unseasonably warm day, but sadder when I inexplicably choose to be inside on an unseasonably warm day.

18. I hardly ever wake up feeling like I want to spring out of bed and greet the day, no matter how long I sleep or how sound of sleep I get.

19. No matter how much money I have saved up, I never stop thinking I'm totally bankrupt and on the verge of financial ruin.

20. I value experiences more than possessions, and will spend money on the former but not the latter, so much that others are sometimes offended by the things that I don't own. ("Oh my God, you don't HAVE a HAIRDRYER?" "Seriously, you don't have HIGH HEELS to wear tonight?" "Why don't you CARE about getting a new computer? Yours is SLOW!")

21. I am never quite warm enough when it's cold outside, no matter how many layers I wear. My ideal room temperature is 80. My ideal outdoor temperature is 85-90. If I get into bed cold, I won't warm up, no matter the number of blankets, unless one is electric.

22. Most video games produced after the 2-D era make me dizzy and nauseous to play or watch. So do IMAX theatres.

23. My dream job is a restaurant critic and my nightmare job is a preschool teacher. My dream job is a reclusive singer who makes all her money on CD releases and small gatherings, and my nightmare job is an astronaut.

24. I have bitten my nails all my life and I don't really see any reason to stop.

25. I need to be forced to do most kind of physical activity other than walking and biking to places I need to go. Once I'm forced, I'm glad I did it. But I'll never make the effort myself.

Anyone ever had their nose get numb when getting cavities filled? I hadn't until last week. It's like your nose is filled with shaving cream or something, but you can breathe through it, so it feels like you're snorting shaving cream up into your brain every time you take a breath! Breathing through your mouth isn't an option because you have a bite wedge, a piece of cotton, a mirror, a sucker, a drill, a rinser, and two hands, if not three, in your mouth, and you do not want the chance, however slight, of accidentally breathing one of these things into your lungs. Having a bite wedge lodged in a lung is way, way, WAY worse than the mere sensation of snorting shaving cream. Not that I ever thought I'd have to make that choice. It's like a 'Would You Rather?' question that would never come up in real life.

But now it has.

Other 'Would You Rather?' questions I thought would never come up in real life, but did:

Would you rather, as a three-year-old, eat fried fish eyes or be ridiculed by your uncle forever for turning down the dare? (answer: eat fried fish eyes)

Would you rather, as a nine-year-old, risk cheating on a history test, or just accept the 95% you would have gotten otherwise? (answer: risk cheating, because 95% IS NOT PERFECT)

Would you rather, as a panic-attacky thirteen-year-old, play your super-exciting bass solo in a concert, or run offstage and hide behind the stairs? (answer: hide behind stairs)

Would you rather, as a twenty-four-year-old, eat a concoction with the consistency and flavor of snot mixed with quail egg, or disappoint the expectant Japanese chef who is staring at you? (answer: loudly and honestly proclaim the delectableness of everything else on your plate while shoveling sashimi into your mouth and hiding the bowl of snot behind the platter of sashimi)

And of course, the big one:

As a sixteen-year-old, would you rather live with your father or your mother? (answer: oscillate wildly until college, then ignore the question)

I am simultaneously playing 10 games of Scrabble and completing an application to be formally readmitted to school. Playing Scrabble at the same time enables me to not totally freak out about having just chosen a career path essentially at random. I mean, it's not as though I chose it out of a hat; if I had done that I could just as well have chosen physics (the only class in which I've ever tried as hard as I can and still gotten a D) or, I don't know, accounting or journalism or something.

I chose psychology, because all the way through my anthropology degree, I was reading psychology books, asking psychology-related questions, and generally unsuccesfully trying to tug my degree towards another one without realizing what I was doing. I was spread-eagled between zoology and psychology, and instead of choosing one or the other, I just chose the middle.

And honestly, it's not like I chose an actual career yet, because there's thousands of ways you can go with psychology. And most of those ways, thankfully and contrary to popular belief, do not involve me sitting in a cramped office with a stranger on my couch pouring every tiny detail of his life out to me while I sit there with my clipboard out trying to be engaging and sympathetic, and also writing at the same time.

Whenever anyone at work has asked me what I'm studying and I tell them, they sort of grimace. It's a familiar grimace. Yuck. Therapy. Couches. Repressed memories. Dream-telling. Oedipal complexes. Hundred dollars a session. Recalling child abuse. Icky.

And I have to explain to them that not only is that not what I'm going for, but that's hardly what anyone's going for anymore (except for the hundred dollars a session, I guess). Hasn't the Freudian wave been out for decades now? Aren't we through with everything, sticks to snakes to pencils, representing penises? And dreams being expression of secretly repressed desires?

If I were to be a therapist at all, I'd want to be a problem-solver, but mostly I'm interested in how people behave when they have more or fewer choices, and also in psychosomatic (idiopathic, as they say in some medical circles) pain and disease. These two lines of thought don't cross, but I'm sure I could make them cross. You can make anything cross.

Last night in bed, after a long, exhausting, day full of brushes with frostbite and incompetent tooth-X-ray-givin', Dan asked me (not out of the blue; it was totally in line with our conversation) why I preferred not to consume pot. Like, what the difference was between smoking it and consuming it, and why consuming it was worse for me.

I gave him such an involved answer, detailing how it was so easy to eat too much before it kicked in, and then ending up stuck, no way back, with a way-too-high high, the kind where you feel like your brain's become maple syrup and is undulating around in your skull knocking into things and causing different and random synapses to light up for no reason before you're entirely prepared to deal with them, that even after I'd finished explaining it and turned over to try and go to sleep, I had described it so accurately that I felt exceedingly strange. Paranoid and strange and not very unlike being, um, way too high.

But I was able to fall in an uneasy sleep by shutting my brain down completely, and it lasted for about three hours before I woke up and felt, not high, but insane.

Literally, I felt like I had woken up into another person's brain. A frantic, obsessive, possibly post-operative person's brain. I'll never argue that I don't have neuroses, but I definitely don't have these particular neuroses, and there they were. Words, phrases, rhymes, were repeating on loop through my head and as hard as I tried to stop them or make sense of them, I couldn't. One I can remember was futon, crouton, and bowl. Futon, crouton, and bowl. It went through on loop so many times that my frazzled and shattered brain tried to come up with a way to make sense of it. And what it came up with was an exercise to see if it could figure out where a cat was most likely to be. But I couldn't manage that! I couldn't even manage picturing cats and futons, cats and croutons, or cats and bowls in the same mental image. Not for a long while. I just let it loop and tried and let it loop and tried again until I finally was about to think of a cat, sitting on a futon, eating a crouton, out of a bowl. Exhausted, I expected it to go away. But it didn't. The alphabet started looping. My breathing started sounding like letters. My stomach felt like a song was dancing on it.

Eventually I woke up Dan and tried to explain this to him, and got so sleepy trying that, mercifully, I fell asleep. I woke up in the morning feeling like I spent all night having seizures, but mentally, basically normal. Until now, anyway, where describing it is bringing it back.

Dan thought it was paranoid of me to guess that maybe a brain tumor was pressing on my brain and making me crazy, or that I had had a stroke. I concur, but it being paranoid of me has nothing to do with whether or not I do things.

It felt like I had a terrifying taste (another, that is; I have tastes spaced sporadically all across my life) of what it would like to be irretrievably crazy, lost amongst nonsense.

I attended the first class of the first college course I've taken since I graduated in 2005, and there's so much that I can't believe I've forgotten about the moment to moment experience of sitting in class. It was at once both new and utterly familiar.

The majority of the class consists of slumped, splayed boys in backwards baseball caps who have slack looks on their faces and always try to sit in the back row so as to play internet Solitaire on their laptops without arousing suspicion. I know this is a common generalization about frat-boy types and isn't always true, but in this class, it is true for sure. These boys think nothing of tuning the teacher out so completely that when he stops right in front of their desk to ask him a question, they look up guiltily with their ears just recently turned on, saying 'What?' and then just sort of try to guess the answer. They don't feel guilty. They don't feel embarrassed. Their faces are the very picture of relaxedness (stonedness, possibly - I wouldn't know because I was never the type of stoner who could handle class high).

There's also that awkwardness of when to stop engaging and listening and start taking notes. For me the two are mutually exclusive. I feel weird when a teacher's going on and on animatedly and fleshing out a perspective or theory and I'm nodding and figuring and forming new ideas and I look around me and everyone is heads down and scratching away bullet points and you can tell that all that they care about is bullet points. Those are always the people who do better on tests.

I was one of those people three years ago, but apparently I'm not anymore. I'm super interested in everything that's going on and can't write about it and think about it simultaneously. I want to answer every question asked. I want to flesh out every theory on the board in more detail than I am given. In short, I have become one of those 'nontraditional students' I and everyone else used to hate because they came to class bright eyed and bushy tailed and enthusiastic, and they never stopped asking inane questions, and always talked to the teacher after class trying to show how smart they were and to expound upon every idea that had ever been brought up ever, and also wanted extra credit and recommendations for further readings.

As hard as I try not to be that person, it's really hard, in a class mostly full (mostly, I say, because there are two or three other people who are not like this) of completely indifferent slouches who are morally opposed to sounding like they actually care about stupid learning. I'll sit there, fidgeting, really WANTING to answer or ask a question but feeling weird about it because I'm the only person who's opened their mouth aside from the teacher in fifteen minutes and I don't want to look like an attention hogger or a show-off or a teacher's pet. Attempting to look bored while answering questions only serves to make the teacher sorely tempted to ask you, 'if you think you're too smart for this class, then why don't you just go ahead and take the final right now?'.

All this aside, I tremendously enjoyed being back in a classroom and exercising my brain, and if I do become that annoying nontraditional student, then I guess that's what I get in exchange for the travesty of being excited about learning.

Boulder is not aware of the fact that it's January. I'm riding my bike like it's April, in a T-shirt, sweating, and everyone's motorcycles are out. Every time I look out my window into the canopy of bare branches and out, all the way out to the plains to the east, I hate my landlord even more. What a perfect summer place. It's basically a treehouse. The only things we're level with are squirrels and stranded cats and power lines and mountains. And our neighbors. But we can't see them, so they may as well not even be there.

All the cats that everyone else in my building is allowed to have are out in full force. Nobody could walk by and not notice this. They're sniffing the newly snowless ground and lounging around on other people's welcome mats and chasing each other through the dry creek that runs, when it runs, out front.

I've been very carefully thinking about the day to day things that make me happy, and trying to avoid the trap that most people fall into when they try to predict what will make them happy. In the book that I referenced a few entries ago there are a bunch of tests that are supposed to prove to you that your brain lies, omits real things, and plants false things when you look into the future. In many of the tests, I perform generally along the lines I'm supposed to to prove the author's point. In one, which tests a grown-up's (as opposed to a child's) ability to see a setup as though they're seeing it from another person's viewpoint, I show less understanding than normal. (Insert selfish spoiled only child explanation here.) But in a few, where the tests are trying to prove that people just make snap judgments about future events based on current feelings, I perform differently in the opposite direction, proving that I don't make snap judgments and I don't really expect to feel the same in two days as I feel now (with a few notable exceptions that I'll get to later).

Here's a very simplistic sample question. The author asks us to imagine how we will feel tomorrow when we eat a big bowl of spaghetti for dinner. Apparently, a normal person is just supposed to randomly throw together an image of some sort of spaghetti and make a prediction based on whether or not they like spaghetti, or feel like spaghetti at the moment. I never do that. I have to ask a billion questions first, such as:

What will I have eaten for breakfast and lunch? Is it Italian food? Is it oatmeal and sushi? Have I been force-fed spaghetti all day? If I've already eaten spaghetti-like things, I will probably be unhappy when eating this dinner plate of spaghetti. But if I've had a light, fruit-and-veggie filled day, or have been starved all day, I will probably be okay with the spaghetti, depending of course on:

What kind of spaghetti is it? Am I allowed to choose or is it just going to be Spaghetti-o's or have a gross olive-filled sauce? Is it that spinach and tomato infused rotini that tastes like cat food or is it a big plate of Dave's baked spaghetti with butter and garlic sauce and parmesan cheese? And also:

I might have the stomach flu. I might have a fever, in which case all I like to eat is grapes. I might have been offered the opportunity for a free dinner at Mateo and would therefore be in an extremely foul mood to have to turn it down to eat spaghetti, no matter what kind or how good. There are a billion things that could go wrong or go right that would change my opinion of spaghetti in an instant.

Apparently most people don't go through these options in their heads. I do. About every decision. Which I don't think is necessarily healthy - having too much freedom of choice is basically a proven headache - but one plus of it is that I never assume that if I buy X, X will make me unconditionally happy, forever and ever amen. I never truly believe that lavish wealth would make me happier, above a certain point (though I do have lapses). I don't feel like my life would be transformed if I bought a car, or a house. I'm still going to be myself. I'll still have waves of irrational dread and have painful problems with my teeth and every day I will have to shave my legs and talk to cashiers at stores and deal with health insurance and tax papers and getting older.

This kind of realism prevents me from making stupid snap purchases and believing that the next magic bullet will make my problems go away. It also gives me a bleak outlook. Not only do I not believe that these things will make me happy, I also begin to believe that nothing can be counted on to make me happy.

Except two things. These two things I can't run through the 'if' filter. I see them just exactly how other people must see a billion dollars, or a new Ferrari.

These things are travel and cats.

I continue to think that if I had the funds and the wherewithal to travel around the world at my leisure, volunteering and eating strange foods and experiencing strange cultures, that this would bring happiness. I also continue to think that if I had as many cats as I want, that the day-to-day experience of feeding and caring for and playing with these cats would bring happiness.

Even these are as realistic as magic bullets get - they both take into account a radical shift in day-to-day experience.

So I'm choosing to view this impending move, this move from a green, high, sweet-smelling treehouse in the mountains to an unknown possible dump, as a good thing. Because in the new possible dump I will be able to have cats.

Oddly enough, I was just having a conversation about whether we all (all of us bloggers) write as insurance against memory or because we have an audience in mind or what. And this particular entry of mine is definitely insurance against memory. So - warning! - this is not written for you all (but feel free to read it anyway, since it's on the internet and all).

It's sort of like that time I was in Indonesia and got my whole salary stolen. As I was writing, I was fully aware that I was whining and not writing in a manner that would hold anyone's interest, but I wanted to get it down so I wouldn't forget how angry I am capable of becoming. I always forget because I don't get very angry often, and I am fooled into thinking I'm not naturally a violently angry person, that I don't get so completely consumed by it that sometimes I almost pass out from the pressure inside my skull.

But I am, and I do. Although the Indonesia entry didn't reflect that. I was in such an alien environment, and so terrified of acting like a spoiled American around all the people living in poverty that I didn't dare elaborate on how angry I was - I didn't even dare FEEL how angry I was.

Yesterday Dan and I received a letter in the mail notifying us that we would not be allowed to re-lease our apartment, that we were required to move out at the end of our term. There was no reason given, but we know what the reason is, and we know why she ('she' being the owner of the property management company, who has a very distinctive idiot-style of writing where she thinks if she conjugates a verb in different ways it counts as saying something different) doesn't want to say what the reason is. It's because she would look like an idiot, saying 'The reason for our decision is that those meanies made me sign a copy of their move-in checklist so it would be on record that I received it. Also, they asked if they could get a cat when we told them they could at the lease signing and when it says clearly on the lease that cats are allowed with permission. How rude! And after that, you know what they did? They accused me of going back on my word, which is totally true! And then - this is the crowning point of it all, where I definitely knew I wouldn't want those assholes renting my property - they wrote me an email saying they disagreed with my conclusion but they were going to drop the matter and not get a cat because they loved living in this apartment so much! That's when I KNEW I wanted to kick them out. Also, they always pay their rent on time, take care of their place, and don't bother the other tenants - and we definitely can't have THAT going on in one of our properties!'

There's only one type of person that makes me spitting mad, this mad, so mad that I get an instant migraine and would, in a second, if faced with this person and a loaded gun, pull the trigger. That type of person is stupid, but conniving. This type of person will go out of their way to hurt others as badly as possible, even when it's not in the best interests of, say, their business. This type of person, when offended, never gets over it, never tries to resolve it, and thinks only of exercising power over the offender until (s)he feels better. They think only of 'winning'.

I offended our property management company's owner inadvertently at the lease signing. I'm still not sure quite how I did it. I think she was affronted by the request that she sign off on receiving a copy of our move-in checklist. She said, 'Just trust me, I received it. I'm standing here telling you I received it.' But our apartment was in terrible condition when we moved in and we had noted all of it down on the checklist and we wanted to make absolutely sure that it was ON PAPER that we had notified them of the condition within three business days, because there was a clause on the lease saying that if we didn't do that, we would be held responsible for any damage when we moved out.

I didn't want them to be able to say we hadn't turned it in, and charge us thousands of dollars upon move-out (this has happened to me before) so I asked for a signature. She was immediately enraged. Why? Because I had taken control? Because I had seen through the plan of the company to get around paying back security deposits? Who knows? After that moment, she despised me. She flat-out refused to sign the paper, and only after Dan had sweet-talked her for a while did she finally - and angrily - sign it.

When I later tried to follow through on our plan - discussed at the lease signing - of getting a cat, by calling and asking for written permission, she dismissed me right out of hand, saying that we 'had no right' to get a cat, and that she 'never said' we could.

And even though we didn't get one, and we said we would drop the subject because of how much we liked living here, she chose to terminate our lease out of spite - not for any other reason but out of spite. She terminated it because we said how much we liked living here.

Revenge out of proportion to a perceived slight, flexing of power just for the hell of it - those are the type of people - perhaps the only type of people - that can get me irrational with rage.

A mere sentence, or small paragraph, in the imitable Stumbling Upon Happiness (thanks, Erik!) caught my eye when last I read it (a week ago, but I'm slow at turnover, okay?) and that was the assertion that people who do not live in California think that they would be happier if they did live in California, while people who actually do live in California don't test out to be any happier than people who don't.

Not surprising, since (as the book points out and as I immediately thought right before I read it) beaches and palm trees and redwoods and sunshine don't make a person's debt disappear, or make their girlfriends love them, or make their jobs more satisfying, or keep their parents from dying. The distraction they provide is a novelty, one that becomes quickly routine, etc., etc.

But having once suddenly uprooted myself from my snowy upbringing, my windy sleet-in-the-face habitat, and thrust myself into an equatorial jungle for six months, I am going to tentatively and probably stupidly say that it DID make me happier, if only a little.

There's an indescribable freedom to being able to sweep out of the house without a thought to layering, or bringing an extra jacket because what if it gets cold, or gloves because what if it suddenly gets even colder. You don't have to have a backpack with all this what-if crap inside of it. You don't have to think, 'oh, I would LIKE to go hike in the park, but clouds are looming over the Rockies and they might contain rain or snow, which will make me cold and uncomfortable, so, here, let me put on an extra sweater, zip-up, so it won't be too hot if it doesn't get cold, and, oh, just in case I won't wear sandals because my feet would feel it first, and also, I better walk because if it gets too windy my bike will blow over and... oh, fuck it! I'll just stay home.'

Instead, you're lying in your house, which, for all intents and purposes, is the exact same thing as lying outside, because every window is open and the roof is made out of tin, and if you think, 'ooh! I want to bike up to Angkasa and sketch the view!' you just GO, because the temperature only drops below 70 when it's a)nighttime AND b)a serious, recordbreaking cold snap. (Every so often, now, sitting in my house in Boulder among the bare branches of winter, I check Jayapura's forecast on my desktop weather widget. Usually, it's 90-something. The other day, it read 68. I almost shit myself.) If it rains, it's like raining bathwater from a giant showerhead somewhere in the sky. You'll get wet, but you won't get cold. You'll almost feel like you should be shampooing your hair.

So the difference is in more than just being nice and pretty outside. The difference is in impulsiveness. Boulder makes it basically impossible and Jayapura encourages it. Being who I am, I need all the impulsiveness-encouraging factors I can get. I need as few excuses not to go out as possible.

It's the same sort of inching-up-the-scale-of-happiness factor as having a car, I think, in terms of impulsiveness. With a car, you don't have to worry about bus routes, most inclement weather, walking alone as a female at night, carrying a bunch of groceries, or going someplace that's far away. However, a car comes with a major (for me) caveat, and that is that being in a car is stifling and mind-numbing and just exactly like being inside!

What made Indonesia wonderful wasn't only the weather being welcoming and nonthreatening and predictable (though I have to say most people disagreed with me and found the heat stifling, fever-inducing, and soaked with sluggishness), but also that the mode of transportation was so exhilarating! Just the traveling part was an adventure in itself, and an outdoor one at that. Zipping around (not even zipping, I don't think I ever reached more than 40mph even on the long deserted roads, because at any moment there might be a three foot wide pothole or a runaway pig) on these crappy rough roads with the muggy sun burning your helmet and the wind smelly and hot... it was perfect.

So from this I gather the secret to at least marginal increases in happiness is living in coastal southern California... but taking L.A., throwing it in the ocean, digging up San Francisco with a bulldozer and placing it where L.A. used to be. Voila! Scooter/motorcycle/public transportation-friendly supercool city with a hot climate! (Oh yeah, and also eliminating dead parents and debt and unresponsive lovers and unsatisfying jobs.) Voila and ha! Back to you, Daniel Gilbert!