You. Over there. That's not a work conversation. I don't care if I don't understand the language. You don't talk to co-workers in that wailing cooing sort of voice. And the convo is easily over half an hour long. But you do burp less when talking to your husband.

And you. On the other side. Please stop grunting. Sighing I can handle, but the grunting is driving me batshit.

Thanks!

Is he taking a hard crap in his cube? Whyfore the grunt?

Is he taking a hard crap in his cube? Whyfore the grunt?

Okay, ew. Thanks for visual. Also olfactoral.

I guess I should just be grateful that if he is crapping, his shit don't stink.

I used to work with an old guy who made many many noises as he went about his work. I was glad not to be the person in the next cube.

On the up side, I have Kid Creole And The Coconuts on the iPod.

Also, educators use learned helplessness to describe behaviors in LD students. The original studies weren't actually about depression per se at all.

Well, the original studies were done with dogs. The first application to humans was with regard to depression. But the example of LD kids is an exact fit to the original idea of learned helplessness, unlike the example of manipulative physicists or attractive women in offices or bosses or, God forbid that Allyson ever has to put up with this, attractive female physicist bosses. The LD kids are failing to make an effort even though making an effort might help them. That is learned helplessness. The bad boss/babe/scientist is making an effort to appear helpless because it does help them to manipulate other people.

Skinner hated the term 'helplessness' because it described a state of the organism rather than a state of the environment, but as Kat points out he studied very similar things. He just gave them different names. He (his students, actually) thought that depression was caused by inescapable punishment or the failure to earn rewards, but that there was no reason to assign an 'organism name' like helplessness to what was really a description of environmental events.

I have just remembered a good easy cooking thing -- marinating chicken in store-bought italian salad dressing. Threw chicken strips in there for a couple of hours, broiled them for 20 minutes, and yum.

Timelies all!

The seat of my pants ripped at work today.(OK, it was just below my seat, but still). I guess that area of fabric was more worn than I realized, because it torn when I went to pick up some tubes from the floor. Luckily a)I was sitting down most of the day and b) the tear was not in an area my co-workers would be looking at, I hope.

Italian salad dressing is a great, all-purpose marinade. I will marinate just about anything in it.

Pathetically, I really only cook with chicken breasts and ground beef.

Oh, and sausage.