i have a course with the director of the clinical program, and i think i managed to make her hate me in the very first hour of the very first class. this is an accomplishment, even for me. i've decided to just keep a very low profile from here on in and hide under the aegis of protection my advisor provides -- fortunately, he's the only one whose opinion really matters right now.

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i'm getting to spend much more time in my lab this semester than last, and i like that. i feel a much greater affinity to the profs in my lab that the ones in the clin psych group; we talk the same language, we don't treat biological imperative as a dirty, vestigial product of our days in the trees. psychologists -- and people in general -- are far too worried that the fact that we are animals cheapens the richness of the human experience. not only is this completely unfounded, it's also highly delusional, as well as (implicitly) saying that we really would like intelligent design to be true, *pretty please*?

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i piloted my experiment on myself, so i finally have some real data to look at it, even if it did come from my own stupid head. there's an indescribable excitement in processing the very first set of data in a study, like opening christmas presents or an unfamiliar bottle of wine. i've learned to savour it, because it's drudgery pretty much all the way after that until everything is collected, which is a long way down the road, longer than there've been fishes in the ocean, etc.