Frail deeds might have danced.

"As far as I can tell," the doctor said. "There is nothing wrong physiologically. So our next step is go ahead and talk to those people--the psychologists and doing the sleep study. But in the mean time, I'm going to give you some samples for you to try and experiment with. And keep in mind that I'm doing this reluctantly, but these helped me when I needed it." And he sent me on my way.

"I am not a big fan of medication," he told me as he leaned back in his chair. "And I don't know if you have a predisposition to develop addictions to medications--that certainly seems to run in the family. But I think there are other options to pursue in this thing. Other ways of figuring it out."

It makes me wonder, as I sit here with these samples lined up on my desk, what my end goal really was with all of this. Do I really want to figure things out and fix them for real or do I just want the crutch? Do I just want to point at myself and say, "Look, I'm broken," or do I want to actually be better instead of feel it? These are things that keep me awake and these are things that stop me from taking the medications.

But, I mean, you know. Life's tough, dude.

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Past the butterfly wall.

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I'm a geologist, not an alcoholic.

I thought I had seen people drink before. Hell, I thought that I had drank before. But, clearly, I thought wrong on both of those counts. I cannot, for the life of me, think of a reason to justify all of the drinking that transpired down there last week. There was no rhyme or reason to it, it just was. Field work just makes a man thirsty. Taking this class was easily one of the best things I've ever done. We worked hard every day out in the field. Wake up at 7, leave the beach house by 8, hit the water by 9. My first three field days were in service on the R/V Acadiana , a 58 foot vessel that towed the CHIRP fish , the air gun, and the streamer to measure all the seismic data--looking at the subsurface of the seafloor we drove over. My second ship was the R/V Itasca using the multibeam , sidescan , and grab sampler --getting seafloor surface bathymetry. They were long, exhausting days and we returned to the docks around 6 or 7 every evening. And then, drinking. So much ...

Pseudo-science (like psych).

I consider myself a man of science. I try to approach problems and deal with them logically, using observations previously recorded to handle new problems. So of course my interest was piqued when someone I knew posited that men are needier and more complicated than women. An interesting theory. But to properly examine it, one must understand the concept of sexual selection and its two aspects: male competition and female choice. Which brings us to point one: men are needier [in relationships] than women. This is true. In a natural/primal setting, the males are generally love-'em-leave-'em kinds of guys. Their main objective is to reproduce as much as they can. Humans, in their infinite wisdom, have decreased the emphasis on this to the point where it has become a footnote in male purpose. Civilization dictates that, instead of finding a partner for the sole purpose of reproduction, males find females for life companionship. With the effective removal of their natur...

everything is fine

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