03/12/2002 - 4:05 p.m.

Well, I'm thwarted by a metaphysic puzzle.

I went to look for Christmas presents for people today. I took precautions and had no money with me, for the safety of the neighborhood. However, even after thoughtful reflection, I will still be spending a good deal. There's one thing in particular that I would love to tell about, because it is the most fabulous gift idea ever, but the recipient reads this, so I can't tell.

This not telling thing is going to be a bit of a battle. I'm miserable at keeping my own secrets. You could tell me all your secrets and I would never breathe a word to anyone, but my own I can't keep for too long. That's why I have no secrets, I keep telling people.

I'm all taken care of with my schedule, or at least, the advisor lady (who is not the same advisor lady I had at registration, grr) says I can register for classes. Whether or not they have them will take a bit of work.

Tonight I become a psychology test subject. It's a required part of the class to pimp myself out for experiments, and that's what the next three days involve: three experiments, one per day, at least an hour of my time doing weird things so that people can look for "coorelations" that don't actually "prove" anything, but are fun to plot! They're mostly filling out questionnaires and such, but still... I have two hours to anticipate the first session tonight, which is something to do with movies and the media, or something.

I oughtn't have gone to Psychology yesterday. It was "Defend Electroshock Therapy Day". I'm sorry, but I'd just as well take LSD as EST if I had depression. It's practically the same idea, really. They take you in, dope you up, strap you down, and send electric current through your brain. This makes you have epilectic seizures and "though no one's really certain just what that does, in some depressed patients it seems to return them to normal."

So, let's get this perfectly clear, you go and shock hell out of somebody's brain without knowing quite what happens and hoping they turn out OK? "Oh, but only about 100,000 patients in the US alone receive the treatment. It's not that widely used." Is it just me, or do those two phrases contradict each other? I can't believe people would just let doctors go in and fiddle with their brains. That's your brain, it's a sophisticated piece of equipment and the best way we can come up with to fix it is to just start jabbing blindly with our ice picks in the name of normalcy? OK, so they don't do lobotomies anymore, but brain surgery is basically still that.

It's ethical to do that, but it's not ethical to unplug somebody who will live the rest of their lives a vegetable? Living as a veggie isn't any more "normal" than the things they "fix" with EST.

My favourite thing about all of this is that all these cures are for Depression. How much more vauge can you get? The Zantax or Zoloft or whatever it is that they show the adverts for on television: "you know when you just don't feel right", that's for depressed people. I don't understand depression. You buck up and get over it. If life is so damned "depressing", change it. That's what depressed people are, they're just unable to change the things they don't like about their lives. You can. Everybody can. Lord, if I didn't know that, life would've been much shittier for me than I thought.

Though, it's funny to hear this from me, because I believe in predestination- not the way John Calvin believed in it, but all the same... I think that the end is there, and it's all planned out, but we just aren't really supposed to be aware of it. We like to think we're changing things, and we act like we are, but what we don't know is that it's already all been figured out. And whoever knows it all, whatever that thing is, is the only kind of divine power I've any understanding of.

Geeze, you see what psychology can do to a person?