Really bored tonight...bare with me.

Things to Remember by George Carlin:

• Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things.
• One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
• If man evolved from monkeys and apes, why do we still have monkeys and apes?
• The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.
• I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
• Could it be that all those trick-or-treaters wearing sheets aren't going as ghosts but as mattresses?
• If a man is standing in the middle of the forest speaking and there is no woman around to hear him is he still wrong?
• If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?
• Is there another word for synonym?
• Isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do "practice?"
• Where do forest rangers go to "get away from it all?"
• What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?
• If a parsley farmer is sued, can they garnish his wages?
• Would a fly without wings be called a walk?
• Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?
• Are they afraid someone will clean them?
• If a turtle doesn't have a shell, is he homeless or naked?
• Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?
• Can vegetarians eat animal crackers?
• Why do they put Braille on the drive-through bank machines?
• How do they get the deer to cross at that yellow road sign?
• Is it true that cannibals don't eat clowns because they taste funny?
• What was the best thing before sliced bread?
• One nice thing about egotists: they don't talk about other people.
• To be intoxicated is to feel sophisticated, but not be able to say it.
• Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
• The older you get, the better you realize you were.
• Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
• Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
• Women like silent men; they think they're listening.
• Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.
• Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.
• Do pediatricians play miniature golf on Wednesdays?
• Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to?
• Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?
• If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?
• If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the rest have to drown too?
• If the #2 pencil is the most popular, why is it still #2?
• If work is so terrific, how come they have to pay you to do it?
• If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?
  

http://breathingearth.net/
See how many people are dying and being born around the world.

http://www.idodogtricks.com/index_flash.html
Type in what you want the dog to do.

http://llerrah.com/skeletondance.htm
Make the skeloten dance!

http://www.maniacworld.com/50-Impressions-in-50-Seconds.html
You got to watch this..

http://halbot.haluze.sk/?id=4706
beware of whats in the background when taking pictures


http://ageproject.specialsnowflake.com/
guess peoples age..


http://www.futureme.org/index.php
send an email to yourself in the future

http://www.spotthedifference.com/explorer.asp?g=2
If you are really bored, see if you can spot the difference in the two pictures.

http://www.energyfiend.com/death-by-caffeine
Find out how much caffeine it would take to kill you.

http://www.playauditorium.com/
Don’t know….

http://www.addictinggames.com/guitarmasters.html
Play guitar hero online.

http://shock-value.deviantart.com/art/Interactive-Buddy-v-1-02-11117398
Kill time torturing this little blob guy.

thoughts for the day...

So I have been working on getting my internship lined up for this summer, thinking that I had all my classes completed and everything would go smooth and on time. Well I got a rude awakening yesterday when I tried to register for the internship course. I turns out I completley missed a class that happens to be a prerequisite for Internship 1. I was devastaed! I had just gotten an interview the day before for a treatment facility that I really wanted to intern at and now I find out I wont be able to intern this summer after all! Well after speaking with my program instructor, I was reassured he would work with me and I could go ahead and intern but I have to wait until the fall semester. Seeing as the course I missed is only offered in spring I will have to do my second internship along with the class. I am upset that my timeline is altered and I wont be graduating until May 2010, but atleast he is working with me instead of making me wait until after the class is complete to intern at all!

So I have decided that with my timeline being pushed back a good six months I will have to start looking for a job so that I can save up some money this summer and be able to afford gas and child care for the fall. At least now I have the money situation worked out, where as before it was all up in the air, and I pretty much just hoped I would be able to afford child care and gas for an unpaid internship.

Yesterday I made a stop at a gas station to apply for part-time work. Baby steps. I have never been the best at working these "just get me by" jobs. But I really enjoyed working at a gas station. When I was 18 I did work for a gas station for a year and I loved the regular customers and the down time where there was no customers and I could choose from several tasks to keep busy. That was the best part, working on my own without someone to directly tell me what to do. So I will be having an interview next week and I am nervous because I have never been good at those on the spot questions. "What are your strengths and weaknesses? Give an example of a time...." I have always had trouble thinking on the spot like that. So I am trying to come up with answers that I am sure the manager will ask. Hopefully I wont freeze up.

Watson's Phobia Factory

I was just reading abit about Watson and his experiement with a nine-month-old infant named Albert B. I can just imagine how messed up that poor child is.

The researchers' first order of business was to establish a psychological baseline. So they tried exposing the infant to a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, and a monkey, and Albert reached for each animal with cheerful curiosity. The researchers brought him items such as masks and clumps of cotton, and he manipulated the objects with interest. They placed a long steel rod behind Albert's head and struck the metal sharply with a claw hammer, and he flinched with evident distress. The infant's baseline reactions to these stimuli were duly noted, and two months later the peculiar series of "joint stimulation" experiments was underway.

Excerpts from Dr. Watson's notes:

Age: 11 months, 3 days
White rat suddenly taken from the basket and presented to Albert. Just as his hand touched the animal the bar was struck immediately behind his head. The infant jumped violently and fell forward, burying his face in the mattress.
Just as the right hand touched the rat the bar was again struck. Again the infant jumped violently, fell forward and began to whimper.

Age: 11 months, 10 days
Rat presented suddenly without sound. When the rat nosed the infant's left hand, the hand was immediately withdrawn. It is thus seen that the two joint stimulations given the previous week were not without effect.
Joint stimulation. Fell over immediately to right side and began to whimper.
Rat alone. The instant the rat was shown the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table.

This just sounds so horrible to me! That poor child was being TAUGHT to be scared of animals. Albert's profound negative response to the rabbit was taken as evidence that the conditioned fear had indeed transferred to other animals, just as Watson had predicted. Albert also showed anxiety in the presence of a dog, and was vexed by a wad of cotton. In the end Watson has his answers but to with what consequences for the poor child? Was the child fearful of animals for the rest of his life?

Motivational Interviewing

Norbert Beuchel-Wagner, an Addiction counselor from Germany spoke in my class tonight. It was very interesting hearing about how addiction is counseled in Germany. One of the main themes was Motivational Interviewing.

The concept of motivational interviewing evolved from experience in the treatment of problem drinkers, and was first described by Miller (1983) in an article published in Behavioural Psychotherapy. Motivational interviewing is a directive, client-centered counseling style for eliciting behavior change by helping clients to explore and resolve ambivalence. Compared with nondirective counselling, it is more focused and goal-directed. The examination and resolution of ambivalence is its central purpose, and the counselor is intentionally directive in pursuing this goal. Motivational interviewing is a client-centered, directive method for enhancing intrinsic motivation to change by exploring and resolving ambivalence.

Another thing I learned is that in Germany they focus largely on prevention. Prevention starts in the family. In how you act around your children, the things you inadvertantly teach them, and the values they learn. Parents are a model for their children. This is so true. How many times have you heard of a father telling his son or daughter to go grab him a beer because he had a long day at work? What is this teaching the child?

Another prevention program Germany has is to teach the adolescents to teach their peers and younger school age children. I think this is a great idea. Who do 6th and 5th and 4th graders look up to? Of course the high schoolers! They are bigger, smarter, and cooler, in the eyes of the younger kids!

One last thing before I go, In Germany there's a new policy in their addiction treatments. When someone comes in for alcoholism or another substance abuse, they are dually treated for nicotine cessation as well. They have to sign a contract agreeing to this if they want the treatment. How great is that? What point is it to help someone quit drinking or using when they are still killing themselves with nicotine? I think the U.S. would benifit from adopting this policy.

Wasted in Wisconsin: Drinking deeply ingrained in Wisconsin's culture

Beer for beer and shot for shot, when all 50 states belly up to the bar, few can hold their own with Wisconsin. The sad part is, us Wisconsinites are PROUD of this! This is our NUMBER 1 Problem.

Binge drinking - we're No. 1.
Percentage of drinkers in the population - No. 1.
Driving under the influence - No. 1.

We lag a few states in beer consumption, but we're near the top. With brandy, it's no contest. We put away more brandy per person than any other state. We have a strong claim on the vodka title, too. And often we have no clue how drunk we are. Person for person, we have three times more taverns here than the rest of the country, and we spend twice as much money inside them.

AT&T's online telephone directory lists more bars in Appleton, population 70,000, than in Fort Worth, Texas; Memphis, Tenn.; or Sacramento, Calif. Wisconsin's abundant taverns are the setting for camaraderie and celebration, but at a cost: Drinking in bars is strongly associated with drunken driving, research has shown. Study the data, read history or talk to tavern-goers. The message comes through clearly: Drinking isn't just something we do to pass time at the ballpark or Summerfest or a Halloween party. It is, for better and worse, an element that helps define Wisconsin as Wisconsin, part of our identity.

Wisconsin leads the nation in the percentage of people who admit to driving under the influence of alcohol. In only a few states are drivers involved in fatal accidents more likely to be drunk. In 2007 alone, Wisconsin's drunken-driving excess claimed more than 70 lives beyond the national norm. The federal government estimates that alcohol claims some 1,250 Wisconsin lives a year - about 2.7% of all deaths statewide. That's nearly twice the number that die from prostate cancer. Drinking is blamed for scores of deaths from suicides and homicides, and hundreds from falls, strokes and liver disease.

We down more alcohol per person than almost any state not because we drink so much, but because so many of us drink. With relatively few Wisconsinites abstaining, our consumption per drinker is lower than about half the states.