i prefer pi

The bit about getting an extra hour’s worth of sleep only works if you go to bed when you feel tired. That is all.

Listening to: Saturday Night Waltz - Rodeo III -Copland
Current mood: sleepy

Just got out of psychology, and I have to say that I give no more credence to Freudian dream analysis than I do to guided sances… To Freud, everything was either a) a phallic symbol or b) a result of birth trauma. If I had a dream about falling out of a tree, it would be representative of erectile dysfunction. If I had a dream about spiders crawling all over me, each spider leg would be a phallic symbol and the dream as a whole would be indicative of perceived insecurities with other males. If a woman had a dream about just missing a bus or train, she’d be experiencing sexual frustration. Assuming that insecurities are a product of the mind (and not induced by some supernatural third party with malicious designs for my soul, which is an issue for another day), these sort of things are practically universal, and even if you aren’t experiencing them, you’ve already submitted yourself to the judgement of the psychoanalyst… You’ve already committed some portion of your dispensable income toward receiving insight into your psyche, and nobody likes to think that they’re wasting money. You’re going to at least give consideration to what they’re saying, and besides, if you don’t believe them, you’re just repressing the truth…

On unrelated notes, I had a good birthday this weekend… got to see the band do their show twice, which was fun. I keep praying that Sarah-Jean is going to be able to march at State. I ordered a CD binder online last night and got a pretty good deal… 200-disc capacity for about $15. Now I’ll have a place to put the Enterprise episodes that I’ve been burning for a while. Somebody broke the rotor on my Chopper Patrol last night, so I have to figure out some way to tape or glue it while keeping the thing balanced. Guess that’s about it.

Last note: Dave Brubeck’s take on “My Favorite Things” is the quintessential piece of rainy-day jazz… Good stuff.

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Listening to: Dave Brubeck - My Favorite Things
Current mood: cynical

I got a 96 on my second Psychology test, which is good

Current mood: cheerful

Specifically October… Sabra thinks that it’s because of my birthday, (which was nice yesterday… the Hall actually came to my room and carried me over to Rudder Fountain and threw me in:) Thanks) but there’re lots of other things… the weather getting cooler, leaves changing, football in the yard, nintendo games, marching band… so many great things. I realized the other day that NES games and my birthday are indellibly linked in my mind… Prince of Persia, Duck Hunt, Captain N and the Gamemasters and this guy here immediately come to mind when I think about elementary school birthdays… Unfortunately, I went and downloaded some episodes of Captain N and Video Power about a week ago and realized that a) the host of Video Power is terrible and b) Captain N used the Light Gun waaay more extensively than anyone who actually owned an NES ever did… oh well
Headin’ home this weekend to see the family for my birthday. Nobody seems to believe me when I tell them that I don’t really want anything for my birthday… I’m almost embarassed that I own so many things already… I guess that if birthdays are an excuse to get quasi-necessities for free, then a new shaver and some pants and a black ink cartridge would be nice, and the tray on my CD burner inexplicably fell out the other day, so I guess that’s the end of that… I keep talking about all the cool stuff that a Gameboy Advance can do, but that’s yet another distraction that I don’t need… that, and it would continue to strengthen the aforementioned assosciation between October and birthdays and video games
Interesting fact from Psychology:
When you enter REM sleep, you also enter a phase of peripheral motor paralysis, meaning that it’s impossible to thrash around in your bed while you’re actually dreaming… You can, however, be leaving an REM cycle and retain memories of your dreams and subsequently begin moving in response to them…

Dimitri and I stayed up too late last night… It started out that I was curious about the quality of the Fellowship of the Rings SVCD that came out in January vs. the quality of the DVD (I can’t tell the difference in most places… the audio was a tad shallow, but not by much) and we ended up watching the whole thing… which wouldn’t have been so bad, except that it’s a 3-hour movie and we effectively started it at 2 in the morning… I’m thinking about reinstating the 4:30 principle… I’m usually up at 8, and I tend to find that whatever I lose from just staying up and not getting 3 and a half hours of sleep is offset by the fact that if I do go to bed, I’m so groggy the next morning that I’m useless for whatever classes I have… I can always sleep late this weekend
No chow today guys… we’ll reconvene on Monday.

CALEB OUT

Listening to: Steppenwolf - Magic Carpet Ride
Current mood: awake

I have yet to hit anything on my bike. I know how to ride in a manner which causes a net injury of zero. Like some sort of cycling machine ripped from a Cake song, my legs, pumping and thumping in time deftly maneuver and carry me from the Civil Engineering building to the MSC in two-and-a-half minutes flat. Rest fully assured that I have seen you and have taken your movements into account. If you think that you’re doing me a favor by freezing, or by jogging faster, or even by shrieking, I urge you to reconsider. I know how to ride my bike. Do you know how to walk?

Listening to:
Current mood: annoyed

For some reason I derive an odd sense of satisfaction when I know that things are exactly how they should be… Most particularly when it comes to tuning and tweaking my computer, but it extends to things like having the carpet vacuumed and making my bed when I get out of it in the morning… Thus far I’ve secured my webserver, gotten port 80 open to the outside world, and I’m about to run a thorough scandisk, defrag and probably a reformat of my second hard drive… A pretty exciting birthday, eh?

CALEB OUT

Listening to: The cool, blue silence…
Current mood: geeky

…or else I just haven’t found where it is yet… (There’s a misspelling… did you catch it?)

EDIT: I found it :)… Now I just have to figure out how to insert graphical smileys…

Listening to: The Eagles - Hotel California
Current mood: frustrated

Okay… now that that’s over with…

Last night I stayed up ’til 4 in the morning studying for my honors Psychology test this morning… I did well, but I think it’ll turn out that I didn’t need to. The test covered Learning and Memory, which was ironic because if I’d already known what I learned in the chapters, then I could have retained the information quicker… Of course, then I would have already known it, so I wouldn’t have had to read the chapter, but if I hadn’t read it, then I wouldn’t have known… So yeah. The circle. It’s round.

Anyway… I’m sitting there in the MSC last night and I keep getting all these micro-inspirations for “Rules to Live By” or at least “Rules to Study By So That You Don’t Have to Stay At The MSC Until 3 In The Morning” and most of them are common sense, but a few aren’t. For instance: if you study under the influence of caffeine, then you will recall the information better if you are under the influence of caffeine when you go to take your test. Makes sense, right? The corrollary’s a bit odder: if you aren’t under the influence when you encode the information and you are when you go to recall it, you’re more likely to not recall as well as if you were. Here’s the kicker: if you visualize yourself drinking a soda while you test, then you’ll do better than if you hadn’t… I’m a bit skeptical of this last part though, because it seems equally likely that you’re introducing a confounding bias: if the person thinks that doing some activity or performing some mental exercise will help them achieve more, then they may actually perform at a higher level because they think they ought to. So I’ve got some ideas for rules I should put into effect while studying, like “Always have covered the material outside of class before it is covered in lecture”, “Never study in your room”, “Get as close to (but not more than) 8 hours of sleep a night” and things like that. I first imagined that behaving according to these rules would take away more of my time than my current “catch-up” study regimen, but I think that in the long run I would actually spend less time on school-work…

Along with changes to my study schedule are a few other things, like making a book-queue so that I always have something that I can be reading… Probably organized into a few headings like “Sci-Fi/Fantasy”, “Literature”, “Books reccommended by others” and “Non-fiction”… I guess better organizing of my time in general is in order. We’ll see what comes of it…

I turn 20 tomorrow. I wonder if it’s why I’m feeling especially introspectful of late. The actual day doesn’t mean so much to me as the fact that I’m soon approaching “real life”… I’m tempted to call it the “second phase” of my life, but thus far I wouldn’t say that my life’s experiences have been a series of discrete elements so much as a continuum… You could liken it to a series of cascading waterfalls, I suppose… There are rocky intrusions and projections and plateaus that shape the flow and if you stand far enough back with the proper perspective, you could possibly identify a few defining features, but it would be folly to try to put a distinct dividing line anywhere… And of course, I don’t exactly have the luxury of getting out of the water

I haven’t talked to Jesse in a while… I wonder what he’s up to…

Well, I think that’s enough thinking and talking for the moment…
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Listening to: Gorrdon Lightfoot - Canadian Railroad Trilogy
Current mood: curious

First post!

Listening to: Clair de lune
Current mood: chipper