Behavioural Modification

As per the requirements of my cognitive-behavioural therapy class, we have to design and implement a behavioural modification intervention for ourselves to target a problem. In keeping with my last post about my messy apartment, I chose to focus on dish washing for the rest of the semester.

I abhor doing dishes and usually put it off for days or until I run out of cutlery. This is obviously problematic. To change my behaviour, I'm using a website called www.mytomatoes.com. It's an online timer that keeps track of how long to work, when to take breaks, and saves your progress online.

As part of my write-up I had to provide baseline data so I took a picture of my sink on a typical day. Behold:



We'll see what happens over the next 5 weeks!

Comps

For the past 2 months I've been working on my comprehensive exam which is a medieval torture device used by graduate institutions. It has been nothing short of ridiculously time consuming and aggravating but I finally submitted the written portion today. I now have at least two weeks to prepare for my oral defence which means I am constructing the Binder of Champions. This includes articles, book segments, and testing instrument manuals that I cite to justify my diagnosis and methods of assessment. I bring this in the defence with me and use it to shield my body from scary questions.

To give you a visual of how busy/chaotic my life has been I'm posting a few photos of the comps bomb that went off in my apartment. For those of you who have lived with me (sorry) you're already used to the carnage so this shouldn't be surprising. However, I'd like to think I've gotten better over the years. Apparently I easily slip into my old habits...

Out of Control

Busy.

Life as a Grad Student

Tonight my dinner consisted of smoked salmon which I ate out of a plastic cup. I knicked it at a Yom Kippur dinner I attended last night at the school. I polished it down with some delicious lemon cookies, also from the dinner (separate cup).

Also, this comic accurately and sadly portrays my life. Literally on Monday I had business pants on, heels, make-up, and straightened hair. Today I am wearing old jeans, a hoodie, minimal make-up, and yesterday hair pulled in a pony tail. I somehow went from Monday to Friday overnight though...

Early views of homosexuality

For one of my papers I have to review the history of sexual orientation research. Here is how the author of one book from the 1960s summarized the research on lesbians:



"A homosexual female has been characterized by a firm adipose tissue, deficient fat at the shoulders and at the girdle, firm muscles, excess hair on the chest, back and lower extremities, a tendency to masculine distribution of the public hair and a small uterus and over-or underdevelopment of the labia and clitoris. There is also a tendency toward a shorter trunk, a contracted pelvis, underdevelopment of the breasts, excessive hair on the face, and a low pitched voice."

A New Semester Begins

Week 1 of semester 3 has begun. Amazingly, it doesn't seem to be awful! The highlights:

- the wheels are in motion for getting my data published
- we're going to be looking at real brains in one of my classes!
- one prof is the older, maler, grumpier version of me
- my boss will probably keep me around for another year

On the down side, my apartment is overrun with Chicago-style silverfish, which are the smaller version of the amazon-like gigantor creatures that lurk in Canada. I sprayed my apartment thoroughly last night and now everything reeks of "country spring scent" and death. I feel like I've passed through a rite of passage because I actually have to spray them myself and vacuum them up instead of making my mom do it.

On a further down note, I see that we're having an election in October. I was reading on the CBC that 68% of Canadians approve of the cons' approach to climate change. As Marc pointed out, what environmental plan? I thought their plan to deal with climate change was to destroy nature as quickly as possible, namely filling in lakes with waste and not really doing anything about carbon emissions. Despite the fact that they received a failing grade on their climate change report card, Canadians seem to be oblivious to this. Le sigh.

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