I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology through Walden University. Right now I am in my first course, which is an introduction to graduate studies in psychology. The course is mostly put in to warm students up to graduate studies. This is probably rather important since the majority of students at Walden have not been students for awhile. However, for someone like me, who has not been out of school very long, it ends up mostly being touchy feely time wasting that has gems of information scattered throughout.

Now as I just said, there are a number of important bits of information scattered in this course. There is a lot of practice in APA style (which I need badly) and a number of development exercises that force us to make a plan for our courses, professional development, and steps to licensure. In between those gems though are thins that are mostly fluff.

Some of the fluff is worthwhile too.

For example, right now we are covering the aspects of scholarly writing. This is includes a couple of video segments that a fifth grader could understand. The best part so far has been the warm up statement which compares/contrasts scholarly writing to things the everyday person has probably written. One thing the speaker in the video brings up is that, “you may have written a note to your child’s teacher…”

Being that I have a mind that thinks in a rather different way from yours, I may be the only person to find a good bit of humor in writing a note to a teacher. I now want to combine the scholarly writing style with all types of usually casual writing. Why simply tell a teacher that your student will be absent on Friday when you can inform them the of the exact reason and a number of important studies that relate to the condition relating to the absence. This is not to poke fun at scholarly writing, but more to make life more enjoyable for people forced to read what I hand them. As such:

Regular Note:

Johnny will be absent Friday.

-Chris

Enhanced Note:

Johnny will be absent Friday. This absence is due to a required visit to the doctor to be inoculated for infectious diseases identified as harmful by the school board (CDC, 2005; SHS, 2009). Any missed work may be forwarded to my home so that negative consequences due to this absence may be mitigated…

Why would anyone use the enhanced note? Because it is fun to use skills you have worked on for years to get quizzical looks from others. Besides, the first sentence is the same, thus within the first two seconds the vital information has been given. Everything after that will give the poor soul on the receiving end a chance to learn and a proper works cited list in order to find your primary source documents.

On a more serious note. Many business documents get far too casual. If you need to write a document for software or policy revisions it will, in reality, benefit your reader to cite source documents and be overly specific. After all, the person reading your recommendations probably does not do your job every day and being very specific will help them understand why the document you have sent to their desk matters rather than just being a vague of a problem you seem to have.

So, for now I am back off to learn to properly cite study notes, video segments, and student forum posts. It may seem inane now, but it will be handy to be in the practice of proper citation once it really matters.

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It’s true!  And there’s more!  We will treat you like family. Sure it will be like cheaply bought and rather expendable family, but at least you will save [DOLLARS] on [SERVICE]!

– Advertisement Off –

Have you ever noticed that every company will save you some intermediate amount of money per year if you switch.  Though that is not what they actually state, it sound like it, but the offer is much different.  All of the ads that follow the above format seem to be able to save you big bucks for a simple phone call.  There is a trick in the language though… “People who switched,” is the specific statement they make.

Now, I ask you this. Have you ever decided to switch to a more expensive service?

You may actually have at some point. The odds are low that this is your goal in life though. The American dream doesn’t often embrace the “how much more could I pay for an equitable service” idea. Almost every time any person is switching companies they are either A.) Moving, or B.) have found a better price.

Now that we have that straight, can we go back to commercials that at least attempt to pander to us because the cute mascot or lack thereof is appealing rather than some conjuration of meaningless numbers.

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A more intrinsic part of this question is how do we be whole and broken at the same time. It may seem a paradox, but over time I have found that it is certainly not. A few things that have helped me arrive at the answer below have been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I have read this particular gem three times and have a fourth reading planned), Stranger in a Strange Land, and practicing yoga with my friends and a number of good talk that have followed our weekend sessions.

The most simple answer is this… At this moment we are just as we should be. This may be the most important part of wholeness. We may be able , may even need, to improve but at this moment where are where we should be. It is that acceptance of the self that creates wholeness in my mind. Every fault, break, and problem is accepted because they are a part of every way in which we are a positive and growing being.

A great deal of literature deals with healing. I think healing from the breaks in our life is important, but I also feel we have focused to much on healing. I like to think of psychological healing in much the same way as a broken arm. Once a bone breaks, there is very little you can do about it. In most cases you should probably see a doctor to get some professional help. Even after that though, in everyday life there is not a whole lot you can do. You can avoid anything that will hurt the arm more, keep it safe, and follow doctor’s orders. However, staring at the cast will not speed up the knitting of bone. Personal problems don’t get better under intense scrutiny either. Big problems may need some guidance from a psychologist or therapist but beyond that the best way to heal is to go on living and let the healing take place in its own time and way. Once again I believe this related back into the idea of wholeness above.

At least one commenter on the post from Spinsterella spoke of “surrendering to a higher power.” I prefer to avoid higher powers myself, but there is a great deal of power in this. Some give themselves to God, I give myself to Yoga… Trust me, the parallel will be clear soon.

A big part of yoga is to stop focusing on the conscious self. Becoming one with your breath is not an attempt to get deeper inside ourselves but to free ourselves from thought and become one with something external. It is a gradual elimination of the ego. It is also an elimination of thought. If you picture the brain as a muscle this makes more sense. If you constantly use a muscle it becomes tired, sore, and not very good at doing what it needs to. If we let go of the ego, let go of the constant thoughts about who we are, how we are right now, how we could be better, and all the questions about why we may not be better we take a great deal of tension of that muscle. Then when we need to really apply our ability to reason we have a fresh muscle that produces clear thoughts.

This is the same process in accepting a higher power. We give up our ego to something above us. We accept how we are and that we are as we should be in the eyes of a creator.

All that said, how whole am I? Good question. Some days I am much more at one with myself and accepting of what my wholeness embodies. Other days I could be said to be a fair wreck. I feel that I am getting closer to personal wholeness because even on bad days I am more able to say “and this is where I am today,” without being nearly as critical as I formerly was.

So, focus less on being broken, focus less on being whole, focus less on healing. You are where you are today, you are where you are in this moment. Let the wholeness of that acceptance fill you, and let yourself be empty for it.

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First, the home TV is busted.  It has been that way for a couple of weeks now, and it will persist in such a state for most likely another week while we wait for the repair company to receive the proper parts.  Along with that I recently attempted to upgrade some RAM in my PC, this resulted in a coincidental death of a memory slot on the motherboard. 

I have since ordered a new motherboard (A nice Gigabyte) and have subsequently RMA’d it.  Yep, an RMA on the new board.  It was simply a bad one (the first non-working item i have received from NewEgg).  From the get go it never once posted to BIOS.  The old motherboard does work – minus  some memory – but the effort to get everything back together just to take it apart again is beyond my patience, especially when i have a laptop.

How does this create professional reading?  Because with no TV and no PC games of any sort, I have a great deal of time on my hands.  I also have the motivation of starting a Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program next week, so quite a bit of refresher work is being done.  It would have been hard for me to imagine a couple of years ago that it was possible to forget some of the basics of classical conditioning, but when you travel abroad and across the country for a couple of years doing anything and everything that does not involve your degree, things have a way of slipping out of mind.

Luckily, relearning is much easier.  I have found the amazing ability to get through one hundred of more pages of text books in a day with almost total comprehension.  This should encourage all of you to start rereading things you learned in the past, the feeling of brilliance is a nice perk!

Who knows… I may even get some real updates ready for Sustainable Democracy…  Reading “Stranger in a Strange Land” has certainly given me ample material to think broadly about.  That and the complete lack of news I get is rather refreshing.

So kids, do like Uncle Chris, read more, watch less, make your friends suspect communism may be rearing its ugly head again.

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While reading through some of the debates, I came across an article that covers very little of that first rather complex sentence but goes very deep into the topics of copyright, intellectual property, micro transactions, and how they do or do not apply in the real world; especially the internet.

Raph Koster’s: "Are microtransactions actually the future?"

I won’t attempt to summarize his views here.  Let it just be said that this is one of the longest and most informative pieces I have seen on the topic. 

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Perhaps instead of “hope” and “change” we should have had the motto of simply “Despair.”  If nothing else it would have been accurate advertising in politics.  But then, we don’t vote for accuracy, we vote for the most appealing lie.  In fact, things have gotten so bad that even CNBC is slowing down on their predictions that sunshine and puppies are in the near future.  This is supplemented by the fact that the majority of their outside experts are looking more grim each day and have been recommending more short sells rather than investments.

However, the Hitchhiker’s Guide may still have the best advice.

Don’t Panic

Things have to get better right?  Less a question, and more a fact.  Things at some point will get better.  We just need to hope that the place of improvement is somewhere before the absolute bottom.

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Then we have weeks like the past few days.

Farah Fawcett – Dead

Michael Jackson – Dead

Billy Mays – Dead

Donald Trump – Alive, but still a jerk

Yeah, weeks like this past one make me happy to be blissfully average.  There are no sudden spikes in the number of regular people dying, it pretty much stays at a regular rate.  Those few times it does really spike tend to be huge plagues or world wars.  Besides that, the number of us coming into and out of the world happens at a pretty constant rate.  Famous people have to deal with sudden unexpected upswells in dying that us average folks get to avoid.

So today, I fell quite happy to just be a guy, not some famous guy.

The whole thing though has some rather ominous overtones.  If there were to be a zombie apocalypse, we would have to fight an unexpected number of very famous zombies.

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While I was browsing some of my photos of the Pilgrim Monument (Province Town, MA) I came across a perfect example of a stone sin I took two pictures of.  One picture the flash happened to go off, and the second I made sure it was off.

The flash washed out all the detail.  The text of the sign was almost entirely unreadable.  With no flash, it took a little more time, and I had to be steady, but the picture is clear and has great color.

Sure, a flash has a plethora of uses.  They are used with staggering frequency in portrait photography, or really any art photography that involves people.  Also, professional Ebay auctions have items captured using either a flash.  However, almost none of these are using direct camera mounted flashes.  If people are using camera mount flashes they are probably A) with the press and need to guarantee light for each shot, or B) doing some sort of sports photography which may require additional light for very fast shutter speeds.

This probably glosses over details that should probably be filled in about flashes and their uses, but it gets the point across.  Besides, you can check out these links for more details:

Short Courses – Using a Flash/Studio Lighting

Dan Heller Photography

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I am back at Deviant Art and posting some of my photography from the last couple of years.  You can find me there as Doc-Shadow.  I took a hiatus of about 2 years from the site.  Partially it had to do with the rather underhanded way they got rid of Scott Jarkoff, one of the founders, and partially a general apathy.

With enough encouragement I may even start playing with space art again… Ok, I don’t really need encouragement, I just need to collect some textures and brushes again so that when I pull out my tablet there is something to work with.  Back in the day when I had an abundance of such things it was rather easy to just sit down and start on a project.  It would only take me a couple of hours to put a decent starting point back together, but inertia is evil. 

Luckily, posting from photos is slowly getting the ball rolling so that the inertia will eventually be on my side rather than against me. 

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Memorial Day weekend was the Ferris/Schaffer Family Reunion.  It happens every year at the same time, though I was absent for the past two reunions (moving frequently never helps), in the exciting township of Wheeler, Texas.  Ok, not the most exciting place, but if you get lost you can walk the whole town and find where you need to be in a short time.

This year the head count was sixty-three (63) for the potluck lunch.  If I remember the count from last year was 67.  Yes, we have big family gatherings.

Some pictures will be posted once I get my hands on them.

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