psyched down

snow today and i love the way she relished it this morning, love the poet in her, the incredible appreciation of beauty and detail that flows from her, lilting in her six year-old vocabularly. snow today outside my window lining the trees with silence. accidents everywhere so i'm glad i'm not driving and i worry slightly about his trips into and out of the city, but mostly i admire its majesty. because nature, so often neglected in my world, really is incredible. and independent. and apathetic. but gorgeous.
snow today and chocolate chip cookies that she brought me now nestling atop the entire bag of salty popcorn that expanded to calm my stomach. at least for the moment. my subjective well-being is off the charts. for the moment.
strangely, he soothed me by telling me i had hurt him, and how much. he soothed me by telling me why he takes great pride in his monogamy. and i pained for having upset him, but luxuriated in knowing he was sincere, serious. neurotic me.
i kept drifting into the slumber i fought furiously against; i wanted to hear his words, wanted to know his thoughts, feel his logical connections, the pulse of the turning gears of his head. he is so consistently brilliant.
according to myers and diener, you cannot purchase happiness. for the most part, i buy this, whether i agree with their purportedly objective measurement methods or not. however, i don't think that i wouldn't necessarily be loads happier if i had the cash to fill my fridge more frequently or pay my bills less stressfully or think about solstice gifts less confinedly. hedonic treadmill or not, i think my life satisfaction would dramatically improve were i just a few thousand dollars richer. not that i'm particularly sad, generally, but the major malfunction of my life tends to be monetary. its elimination would probably ratchet my objective measures up a great deal. which i suppose makes me more like destitute india than prosperous canada.
the more i consider brickman and cambell's propositon of ultimate hedonic neutrality, the more i gag. and the support they offer and the later studies that claim to lend further support. i want to corner these men in a room with a barrage of inquiry. if hedonic neutrality is real, why do people kill themselves? is everything so adaptable, so bearable? and why do these two men get to decide what is bearable? what qualifies them?
she told me today that they've stopped considering personality an integral part of the curriculum and have mostly rejected its coverage from the department. with his retirement. and, god, he was a crackpot, but they needed one. he spiced things up. what's psychology without a few good psychos? while i'm entirely in agreement about the social nature of the human being and the importance of studying humans in groups, i don't believe one can rightly study the human mind or human interactions without somehow accounting for individual personality, temperament, traits (heritable or otherwise). these affect so much, alter interactions and interpretations immeasurably. must everything be generalizable when, really, nothing is general, everything is customized? it's a huge part of why i enjoy the classroom manifestations of my summer work; the personalities that breathe life into the skeleton i provided, that make this job worth tolerating, the project worth considering. if that's the department's trend, then it's little wonder that she's chosen to ignore so many individualized variables in this project. i suppose she can't capture them all and that it would be tedious and somewhat counter to her purposes to analyze data individually. but that for me is most intriguing: the longitudinal individual has undeniable appeal.
which is why i could never conduct my own grand-scale research. i would forget about the groups, focus on the individuals, want to pull a robert coles and take pictures, capture stages of individual lives, lose myself in the development and growth of isolated points and completely miss the trend. i would want favorite colors, childhood stories, 3-d characters.
i sit in classes and dream up lives for the kids, dream up thoughts for the kids, ambitions for the kids, where they'll be in ten years, who they'll be, what they'll be doing. this is what i ache to write. this is what i need to create. if only i had the discipline to actually sit down and do it.
this might be part of why i disliked that movie that everyone else seemed to fairly enjoy. its scope was too broad. i wanted the nitty-gritty, the dirty fingernails, the flecking elbow skin. i wanted the life histories, the deeply personal connections. the general looping of those four letters through the skimmed over lives of many only scratched the surface of my interest. for that to truly captivate me would have taken ten hours more.
queasy again and the fluff's stopped flowing, mostly melting off the branches that sag beneath its dampening weight. she exclaimed about the pooch of my belly this morning and he defended me so sweetly. how shocked she'll be when i start to get really big, when she topples off my lap because timmy's inching into her sacred space.