ramblings

Now that I’ve been blogging for so long, having withstood a number of huge technological waves, I have a fair bit of experience with interacting with people online. Often, due to the nature of some of my posts, some of those interactions are less . . . congenial than I would like. Certainly less congenial than I’d treat other people online. But I’ve been taking notes, trying to refine just how to be as big of a boor to random people, in hopes that I might share this with you, my faithful reader. I mean, you could potentially look at

Today in my psychology class, we talked about overcoming anxieties by repeated exposure to those anxieties. One of the specific examples used was the fear of rejection. We talked for a while about how people overcome that fear, and it got me reflecting on what experience I have with it. Looking over the blog, I’ve talked about rejection a lot. I’ve written about getting rejected by schools, by girls, by libraries, by publishers, and by readers. (It was interesting to go back and read some of the posts I’d written way back when–before I’d had much experience blogging–about getting rejected

Yes, I’m still in my psychology class, and I’m still thoroughly enjoying it. Today we made it to the DSM-5, the “bible” of psychological disorders. And as part of the introduction, we had a discussion on self-diagnosis. To me, this has always been a pretty cut and dried topic: I don’t know nearly as much as psychological professionals do, so why would I think I’d be able to read over some symptoms and decide whether I had some disorder or not? Interestingly, not all of the students felt the same way, and as I thought about it, I realized that

It’s the 22nd day of the 2nd month of the 22 year of this millennium. It’s also a Tuesday. And while part of me can see why this seems like a particularly cooler day than any other day, another part of me is kind of baffled why it should feel that way. Was this always a thing, or did it just wait until Facebook, so people could post about “today is a day that will never happen again for the next buhzillion years, because __________”? It’s funny: there are some things that I end up doing that make no sense

The psychology class keeps chugging along, and I keep finding new and interesting things to think about. (Which makes me think if I’d taken an intro to psychology class during my undergraduate career, I might have ended up a psychology major instead of a linguistics major. Maybe I’m just a sucker for interesting things . . .) For our next class, we read up on the proper use of case studies and the way they inevitably get abused. I’m (fairly) sure you all know what a case study is: an in-depth analysis of a single person’s experiences with something. In