Rubb: In

I was going to write something about how I too am hitting some lows. But Captain Ron? Jesus Kyle. There's not much lower than that.

CounsinFun: I've been planning on writing a blog for a while about coming up with some fun shit to do while we're all out there for the wedding. Jeremy's birthday is May 21, so we'll definitely get into something (bars or camping) that night. I'm around the week after the wedding, and suggest some backpacking. There has been some talk of traveling by river, specifically the Green River from southwest colorado to moab. I have been planning to research this possibility a bit more before writing about it, but oh well. Let me know if you think it would be a good idea. I know it's possible to rent rafts in Colorado and return them in Moab, but we have the problem of high water and not knowing shit about rafting.

My Life: I've been completely dominated by school for as long as I can remember. It's very mentally demanding so when I'm not doing it, I just want to watch stupid shit on television or get hammered. This belief that the time I spend not working should be a complete mental vacation is definitely problematic, and definitely the reason why I haven't blogged or done much of anything else worth doing for a while. 3 more weeks..

Research Findings: I've made two this year, which is strong. 1 is that people make inferences based on other people's memory. So if I hear about a bad restaurant experience from someone that took place a long time ago but they remember it very well, then I think it must have been really bad. Not soo surprising, but might be influential because it's the first to show that this occurs.
The other finding is about psychic numbing. When people are given a good thing and the opportunity to trade for another good thing, they generally don't trade, because they like their first thing, and this is called the endowment effect. When you give someone 8 good things and the opportunity to trade for 8 other things, trading rises to 50%, because when there's a bunch of them, people get less attached. However, it's different when these things are negative. When you give them 8 negative things and the opportunity to trade for 8 other negative things, they almost always stay with their original 8. It's a hrad decision and one they don't want to think about, so they just turn off and stay with the status-quo.
This was actually a quite amusing experiment to run. We needed something negative that we could give to experiment subjects, and we needed a lot of them. It's hard to get away with inflicting anything painful on them, and we didn't want to give them something that they would just throw away.
We decided to tell subjects that it was a taste-test for experimental flavors of yogurt. So we mixed 16 positive flavors of yogurt (cinnamon, mango), and 16 negative flavors of yogurt (horseradish, anise, chili, tarragon, celery salt, sage, mustard, onion, wasabi...) We actually made these yogurts, made packaging for them, and made over a hundred people eat them. Fun stuff. A few gagged, which made me gag.


What else. I had "the talk" with my girlfriend fairly recently. She accused me of having a fear of commitment. My response was that my fear of commitment is like my fear of snakes. It's not something I want to get over.

I haven't been grocery shopping in months and I eat either jimmy johns or subway every single day.

I saw The Slackers a few nights ago. Awesome band. Ska. Check it. Seeing Soulive saturday probably.

I'm a complete beer snob.

I plan to get my adventure on in late july / early august. might be as small as a few weeks in colorado or as big as a month in katmandu. compromise of 3 weeks in south america is probably the most likely. Anyone interested? Dates are flexible, and I know the possibility of some Jake-back mountain rises the later I can push it back.

I've vowed to be more artistic. To make something with my hands. 3 more weeks... Also more passionate, expressive, adventurous, spontaneous, etc.