This never happens to me in real life

Last night I had a rather confusing dream. A friend of mine whom I have known since my first year of university was talking with me, and almost immediately it came out that she was interested in me. We started dating, and with that came the sex. The funny thing was, that despite her apparent (though entirely theoretical) satisfaction, I could never remember actually having sex. You'd think that would be something I would remember, but I didn't even have any knowledge of anything leading up to or immediately following it. The dream promptly sunk into a sitcom-esque subplot of a former girlfriend of mine coming to visit and having to hide her from the current relationship, but that's clearly unimportant, much like all the episodes of Happy Days it was based off. What is important that now I'm feeling awfully awkward about having to go to class with the girl today, because the dream was too damn vivid. Nothing will happen, but the question still begs:

Will it be as awkward as I'm imagining it to be?

How you can tell I made my own dinner tonight

- I ate at 10:30.
- In front of the television.
- It consisted of two cobs of corn, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and two Chunks Ahoy! cookies.
- I ate the cookies first.

Treachery!

Two of my most anticipated albums of the year were Paul McCartney's Chaos and Creation in the Backyard and My Morning Jacket's Z. However, when trying to upload them to my computer, I ran into a problem that thousands of music consumers are running into: copy protection. Now up until recently, I didn't have a problem with Copy Protection because the protection on CDs wasn't invasively done; I could still upload albums to iTunes and copy them normally to CDs for other family members. However, in recent months two of the four major label groups, EMI and Sony BMG, have begun to make their CDs compatible only with Windows Media Player in response to Apple refusing to license out FairPlay iPod compatible copy protection or raise prices of songs in iTunes. As a result, the albums are incompatible with iPods, the leading digital music player in the world.

What I find asinine about the debacle is that amidst a season of low CD sales, EMI and Sony BMG have decided to inconvenience potential customers in a way that many, like New Jersey banker Ryan Kuczynski, are deciding to cease being customers entirely. In this case, the labels are directly driving many consumers to download the album illegally or through iTunes. And without the support of Warner and Universal, the latter of which is the world's largest label and fundamentally disagrees with copy protection, EMI and Sony BMG don't have enough clout to force Apple to cave.

In this scenario, who am I to support: Apple, a company that may be legally inconveniencing other companies but has provided me with great and consistent products and service, or two major labels who are directly inconveniencing me?

I wonder.

made my day

Today in Abnormal Psychology, Dr. Wardell was lecturing on self-report measures of stress, specifically LCUs (Life Change Units.) Essentially, this is a system assigning numerical values ranging from 1 to 100 to stressful events. It is based around marriage at 50 LCUs and death of a loved one, which comes in at a whopping 100. A person looks at the list, marks down what stressors they have (in what numbers) and totals their score. Scores of 100 and 200 are serious enough; a person who climbs the stress ladder to a score of 300 indicates a 3 in 4 chance of suffering from a serious stress-related health issue in the near future. As Dr. Wardell put it, "to reach this point in the simplest way, a person would have to be married three times in one year and have all their spouses die. At that point they're looking at a serious prison sentence." He added with a smirk, gesturing at the chart, "Which, as you can see, is another 63 points."

Mathematical inconsistencies aside, that was spectacular.