Had to share this. This is what schizophrenia’s like in comic form.

Today’s psyc tutorial. I always look forward to psyc class because there’s one individual who I’m keen to see. Except I can tell she doesn’t seem to feel the same way as much since week 1. But you know, it’s university. People come and go. There’s probably only 2 real friends I’ve made in university that I’ve maintained contact with for more than a semester.

So today we get assigned our debate topics. We chose from a list of what we preferred and our what sides we would like to argue.

Some of the topics include:

Is media violence harmful to children?

Do Millgram’s obedience experiments help explain the nature of the holocaust?

Are mind and brain the same?

It just so happens that the topic I’ve been assigned is “Does evolution explain why men rape?”. In this debate, I’ve been assigned the affirmative position. I am so not looking forward to this. I was really hoping for media violence but nope. Instead, I get a topic which is going to make me sound like a douche unfortunately.

But it gets better.

Who is my opponent? None other than smoker chick. I’m sure we can share sources and the like, but we won’t be able to collaborate or work together or anything.

After tonight’s lagfested raid, I did some more reading. Right now I’m on the chapter on online dating. I’m not even at that stage yet. But then I got a call from my friend. I guess she had nothing better to do and wanted to try to help diagnose me. So we went over all past relationships and crushes and I explained what the deal with each of them was. She managed to isolate one important thing. I had no problem approaching people in high school and getting rejected. But something happened after high school. She noticed I wasn’t as bold anymore and became more cynical. To be short, she hammered home that I wasn’t really trying and was coming up with excuses that may or may not be truth.

Personally, I think that some girl in a relationship already (even though it’s rocky) is a valid excuse.

And I don’t know if I’d be able to date a smoker. She did insist she was trying to quit though. I still have my reservations.

She completely decimated my time theory though. After taking into account sleep, WoW, writing, school, travel time, she said I still had 58 hours left over per week to either spend time with or chat with someone. For whatever reason, I felt I had less time than that. There goes my defense.

What about money? I write freelance, which is sort of stable. But then she mentioned what monthly expenses were like. I suppose the reason why my reasoning was all skewed in such high extremes is because I’m basing it off my last real relationship where I paid for most of the activities. I believe those types of people are called gold diggers.

Apparently the diagnosis is simple. Fear of failure.

I wonder what House would do. At least I got to chapter 2 of Professor Layton.

Monday. The start of another week. I’m not a big fan of mondays. I opted to go to school a bit earlier today. Hopefully I’d be able to meet a friend there and we could spend some more time chatting. Turns out that wasn’t the case! Before I knew it, it was time to hit the lecture hall. I think I saw stats girl sitting at a nearby table but I couldn’t be sure. For whatever reason, my friend managed to become friends with her.

It’s a long story.

Sociology’s just about the same as I remember it when I took it several years ago. I’m retaking it again to hopefully boost my GPA. I did well on the tests, but I sucked out on the paper. The class felt very bland. I was sitting next to one of those really over-eager first years. Yeah, the one that raises his hand to answer every rhetorical question the prof asks. One of THOSE guys.

Managed to meet up with my friend after. Not only that, this was the first time stats girl and myself were formally introduced. Seems nice. But she’s way out of my league. Anyway, she offered my friend a ride down the side of the mountain. She should’ve taken it. I would not have minded if she took her up on that offer. My friend asked me if I wanted a lift down to Lougheed with her, but I said no. I don’t know why. I’m sure stats girl was being kind and all. I have this weird idea that a person of a higher social class wouldn’t be interested in anyone below them. I know it’s not always the case. She still intimidates me.

All I can say is, I’ll never understand why amazingly beautiful women go out with douchebag guys. Must be one of those things, I guess. Oh well.

Anyway, hung out with my friend on the skytrain back. We were discussing things different book ideas that we’d write. If I weren’t writing about WoW, what else would I write about? Somehow I came up with a fitness book. Figured I’d call it “Lose Fat with Matt”. Wouldn’t that be funny? Too bad it’d never happen.

After the raid was over, I watched the 2 hour season premiere of House. What a great way to open the series. This is going to be an exciting season.

I started cracking open that dating book I got for my birthday. I didn’t feel like doing anything academic for the time being. Comics could wait, too.

So the very first question it asked:

Why do you want to be in a relationship?

It’s not that I don’t want to be in one. It’s been 5 years since my last real one (which ended fairly horribly). I’ve never been able to go back to the attitude and mentality before. But here’s the thing: I’ve got so many commitments right now and not a lot of time. I wouldn’t be able to invest as much time as I’d like into a relationship that deserves it. It wouldn’t be fair to the girl. Yeah, sometimes it sucks when you go out to parties and you’re like the 9th wheel. I try not to let that bother me anymore.

One of the next exercises involved listing every single relationship or crush and outline why it failed or never started. That’s a fairly decent sized list. Excluding Jessica Alba, I probably came up with around 9. In the early part of the twilight hour, I felt very awake. I’ve had a hard time getting any sleep lately. I sleep late at around 1 AM and I frequently get up at 7 AM. Too much on the mind I guess.

I still have to finish revising my article for the new WoW magazine. Need to come up with two post ideas for the wow.com site this week. I’m also working on an analysis of Robert Gates (US Secretary of Defense). He’s been responsible for much of the budget changes in the US military.

Time to play some Professor Layton!

It turned out to be a fairly frantic but thoroughly enjoyable day. Woke up with some tea and inserted the instant breakfast into the microwave. Started the day off with a bit of Warcraft and then the afternoon was spent working on writing. Got my magazine revisions back from my editor. Whoops, I wrote it from the wrong perspective. He wanted them from the first person whereas I was writing the interviews from the third person. No big deal. I still had my raw notes anyway.

Today was to be my birthday party. My actual birthday isn’t for another several days, but I picked this day because it was the day where everyone would be able to make it.

I also did a Family guy marathon of sorts. Big mistake. I always tend to procrastinate. Watched all of season 7 throughout the day while I was playing WoW (Having two monitors is great). 330 rolled around, and it was time to finish my assignment. It was due later that night at midnight. Yeah, big time procrastinator. I got the message one of my other friends was unable to make it. Must’ve caught something extremely bad. I hope she gets better soon.

When 5 PM came, I had to stop my summary assignment. It was time to go. I would’ve been done in another 10 minutes anyway. Went shopping and dropped money on some ingredients for pasta tonight. I should really be supervised better when I go shopping. Probably with at least 2-3 people to triple check everything.

Arrived at my friend’s basement suite. Sweet and sour onion chips and the veggie platter. I had five carrots. Figured that would be my quota for the evening. I introduced my new friend from SFU to my high school friends. She’s still fairly new to the area and didn’t know as much people. I figured I’d try and help expand her social network some.

Anyway, started off with some guitar hero 5. I was supposed to butcher Blink 182’s Rock Show and Elton John’s Saturday Night’s Alright. I wielded that microphone like a meat cleaver, that’s for sure.

Meanwhile, the ones who were most skilled at cooking were busy preparing the pasta and the sauces. Unfortunately, we were only 1 for 2. The Alfredo was lost. I grabbed the wrong kind of cream. Whoops. I thought the marinara was great with the chicken. My other friend’s girlfriend was kind enough to bake me a chocolate cake. Now even though I’ll eat anything, I have supremely high standards when it comes to dessert. I have to say, her chocolate caking abilities were extremely strong. Only thing was the cake had a huge hole in the middle. It was like a donut. A really large donut. I wonder what happened to the middle.

Naturally, as we progressed through the night, it was inevitable that we would reach the stage where embarrassing stories about the birthday guy were told. My SFU friend had been kept in the dark about this. I figured it would’ve been more entertaining if my friends told the story. There’s no way I could do it justice.

On the bright side, they didn’t tell her my propensity for screaming on high velocity amusement park rides.

Finally, we closed off the night playing some Taboo. This is probably one of the best party games in existence. I think some of the highlights of the night were:

“2.99”
”SUBWAY!” (Correct)
”Sapphire”
”RUBY!” (Correct! WTF Matt, how did you guess that?)

Here’s some of the gifts I received. Thanks guys!

The host got me that book. Funny guy! It was suggested that he gave me his own used copy. Frankly, I wouldn’tve been surprised!

This should keep me off of Warcraft for a while. I have this urge to try and solve puzzles.

Yay! Now I can learn more about Warcraft lore!

Day 1

I was anxious to get to school. I had met someone in one of my classes whose company I enjoyed. It’s been a long time since I’ve met a person like that. I was eager to see her again at school.

After I arrived in lecture, I was pleasantly surprised to see she had saved me a seat. How thoughtful. Couldn’t talk much but that’s the way lectures were. We sat and took down what notes we could occasionally glancing at each others papers to make sure we had everything relevant.

I was disappointed after the fact since we couldn’t spend time together. A classmate approached her and started talking. She wasn’t able to disengage herself from the conversation. I sighed, shook my head at her and decided to grab coffee instead to get me through the rest of the day. No worries. Five hours to kill. My parents would be departing for Hawaii today. I’d have two weeks all to myself at home. Would I manage? We’ll find out.

After I picked up Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol from Chapters, I was almost home before I made a pitstop at a friend’s house. He’d just acquired some new hardware that needed assembling and I was the only one available. Several hours later, and after we called for some backup, we were able to finish. By the time I got home, it was 9.

Made myself a nice instant dinner of shrimp, scallop and pasta with some chicken on the side.

Collapsed onto bed after finishing my work.

Day 2

Morning raid. Earl Grey helps in the morning. Pulled another pack of left overs and combined it with some macaroni. I’ve got lots of instant dinners loaded up in the freezer to last me for a few days before I need to make a supply run.

Made a critical mistake. Wiped my face on my sleeve. I still had tomato sauce on it from lunch. Orange stain on my sleeve. Limited supply of shirts remained. 20 minutes of cold water and extensive scrubbing later, the stains were successfully removed.

Managed to power through the rest of Dan Brown’s book today. It’s now 130 AM. So exhausted.

Have you guys seen this?

Wow. Kanye’s a douchebag. He seriously shot himself in the foot that time. He completely cut Taylor Swift off during her acceptance speech during MTV’s VMA.

“I’m sorry, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time,”

Like, seriously? Crossed a line big time with that one, I think. Beyonce seemed shocked. Pink had to get escorted by security away from Kanye. Apparently he got kicked out of the awards show though.

How’s this for being classy? Beyonce called Swift up on stage and encouraged her to re-do her acceptance speech.

It’s rather unusual to have tutorials before lectures are held. I was also assigned to do some readings. This is going to shape up to be an interesting course. Basically the professor looked for the most extreme and sensitive topics and tossed journal articles relating to them in a customized text.

So what did we get for week 1?

A journal article proposing applying therapy to homosexuals in order to make them go straight. We’re not talking like a miracle drug. Just a simple sit-down and talk for hours on end. The rest of it just goes on and on about why it’s valid and should be accepted. It does state that homosexuality is not a mental disorder and all the standard cover-your-ass type stuff.

Who would want to make the most famous person in Austria go straight anyway?

In any case, this was a lesson in seeing if certain studies are full of shit or not.

Method

Always look at the method of study. Self report surveys are usually an indicator that one should dig deeper. Studies that involve control groups and experimental groups fare better and are more easily acceptable. In this case, the paper reported that people went into treatment with the intent of changing their sexual orientation. After therapy, all of them reported either they were straight or that treatment was ineffective.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the administrator of the study should be the one who determines that not the ones that undergo it.

Dates

The article cites studies from the 30s and 40s. That’s not exactly recent work. There’s another red flag.

Sources

The paper cited Freud. Yeah, Sigmund Freud. I know he was instrumental to the development of psychology and stuff. But psychoanalysis went out of style decades ago.

Peer review

This particular study was not submitted for peer review in certain journals. Now why is that? Maybe it’s for political reasons or something else is at work here. But if you genuinely believe what you’re researching, why not lay it open for the rest of the community to critique it?

So how else did the rest of my day go?

They renovated my self-patented spot. All the seats that were against the wall were remade into solid wood. That’s going to suck for prolonged seating. I should bring a cushion or something.

For once, instead of sitting alone and letting others filter into my table, I decided to try something different. I noticed there were these two other girls sitting at a table and opted to sit with them. I basically asked if they had read the assigned reading and how they found it and then managed to just sneak in with a seat. After that, I introduced myself. Found out they were both first years and new to the university.

I’ve been in school for a long time. I want to get out.

So let’s talk about bad habits. I have many of them. One of the biggest bad habits I have is overextending myself when it comes to various project. My concept of time and project management has deteriorated over time. I’m probably tackling like 3 blogs and a print production at the moment.

And school’s coming up. Just great. I wish I could leave already. I wouldn’t mind finding me a writing gig somewhere. I sort of wish I had gone into communications or journalism. I originally started my WoW blogs as a hobby. Somewhere along the way, it became a profession when I got paying offers to write for other sites. Crim just doesn’t hold that same appeal for me as it used to when I signed onto it initially.

Or maybe what happened is my goals changed.

Unfortunately, I’m stuck where I’m at now with little chance of changing. If I could wipe my academic career and start over again, I’d probably do it now that I know what I want to do. It’s not very often people find a job that they enjoy getting paid to do.

I just have to micro-manage these habits. Or get me a personal assistant. Actually, I probably have a better shot of the latter.

“Ugh! It’s still bleeding!”
”OMG, it’s moving!”
”How can you possibly EAT that?”

Those are the reactions I get everytime I order a Prime Rib medium rare. And this is what medium rare looks like. Sorry, but I just thinking eating meat that’s well done is just a waste! It’s so savory and tasty! I think this one’s a 12 oz that I ordered from Outback Steakhouse down in Anaheim.

I also ordered me a Hefeweizen down there as well. First time I tried it. Pretty good considering the only alternatives were Bud, Bud Light, Budweiser, Coors, MGD, and Sam Adams.

Where’s all the Canadian beer at? The 7-11’s had Stella, Corona and even Asahi from Japan! But no Molson Canadiens, Alexander Keiths or any of the stuff I like to call real beer.

Staring at that picture is making me hungry again!