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.