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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.