My stories won't be nearly as fascinating as tylertwo's. Mostly this is just a place to write random thoughts.

I actually enjoy writing quite a bit. That's probably a good thing, as I've been writing my dissertation for three years now (or avoiding writing it as the case may be). It's not the writing part of the paper that bothers me. I actually rather enjoy that. There's something oddly satisfying about having an idea and finding the exact words and phrases to bring that idea to life on paper. Okay, usually on a computer screen, but you get the idea.

So yeah, I enjoy writing. Which is helpful for school, but also just a fun outlet for thoughts and stories. I'm constantly telling myself stories in my head. Am I the only one who does that? Or at least the only one this far outside of childhood? I think it's something we all do as kids, imagine stories or scenarios and play them out in the stage in our minds, but for whatever reason I never stopped doing it.

There is no specific theme to this blog. Random thoughts, maybe some stuff I've written, the odd rant or two about things that are bothering me. Just my brain spilled out on the screen.

For those who don't know, the title of this blog thread is the opening to a famous Emily Dickinson poem:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Hello, i am somebody, hello nobody

RJ, who's your favorite or scariest serial murderer?

Shadows and dust

That's kind of a weird question insofar as having a favorite sociopathic homicidal criminal.

I'd have to say probably the one that started my fascination with serial killers: John Wayne Gacy. My freshman year of college, the book "Killer Clown" was assigned by my Intro to Criminology professor. God alone knows really why, except that intro classes are fairly broad in scope and boring, and the book in question was written by the lead prosector for the case. There's a lot of detail about the investigation that led up to his arrest.

Anyway, we were of course supposed to read the book over the course of the semester, a couple of chapters a week or whatever. I had it finished in under a week. I found the entire thing just fascinating. In addition to detailing the investigation and the little errors Gacy made that finally allowed them to build a solid enough case to secure a search warrant for the crawl space under his house (where they recovered the vast majority of the 33 murders I believe were formally charged to him), they also provided a lot of detail about his history - childhood, early crimes, things of that nature. Following the trail of what helped create a personality that would do the horrible things he did is just something I really enjoy delving into, although at times I wonder what that says about my own psychology.

Serial killers are like the most extreme intersection of criminology and psychology. It's difficult for people to hear about what someone like Gacy, or Bundy, or any type of serial killer/sexual offender does and understand how any person could do that. But when you learn the background, you can start to understand. Not condone, but comprehend. I think most people can appreciate on some level why a man might kill someone when he walks in on his wife banging the mailman - we've all been blind with rage, as it was, so on some level we can understand that impulse, even if we would never act on it, or at least not act on it to that level. Most people cannot understand the much darker impulses that lead to sexual homicide, but when you get into the history, you realize that the individual pieces are all there in each of us. These people are just the extreme outliers on the bell curve of human behavior, but the underlying drives are there in all of us. Just not shaped into the form they take with a Gacy.

I've read books or book chapters on a fairly large number of serial killers, as well as books written by some FBI profilers. My favorite serial killer books are Killer Clown, Helter Skelter (on the Manson murders, obviously, although he's not technically a serial kiler), and The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer. If you want to read some books by profilers John Douglas is fairly prolific but his style is somewhat grating - he loves the sound of his own voice, and that interferes at times. One of the best of his is The Cases That Haunt Us, which is more theoretical since it involves famous cases like the Ripper killings, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and others he wasn't personally involved in, so it gives you more of an idea of what profilers look for, their thought process when they recreate criminal personalities from crime scenes, without his own pompous inflation of how awesome he was on a particular case, since obviously these were mostly before he was born.

Nobody loves me,
Nobody cares,
Nobody picks me peaches and pears.
Nobody offers me candy and cokes,
Nobody listens and laughs at me jokes.
Nobody helps when I get in a fight,
Nobody does all my homework at night.
Nobody misses me,
Nobody cries,
Nobody thinks I'm a wonderful guy.
So if you ask me who's my best friend, in a whiz,
I'll stand up and tell you that Nobody is.
But yesterday night I got quite a scare,
I woke up and Nobody just wasn't there.
I called out and reached out for Nobody's hand,
In the darkness where Nobody usually stands.
Then I poked through the house, in each cranny and nook,
But I found somebody each place that I looked.
I searched till I'm tired, and now with the dawn,
There's no doubt about it-
Nobody's gone!

-S Silverstein

Are you gonna talk about anal sex itt?

That's not the specific purpose, no, although I may talk about sex in general.

Part of me was sad when that thread was nuked.

Also nice one YB, I read that years ago but forgot it.

I'm a mental case with huge seniority , have just retired from grinding because of that, so feel free to ask me about anything if you need more material for the dissertation.

I enjoyed your mental game videos for PokerVIP a year ago when I knew little on this topic, some of their points were revelations for me at the time, like the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and people's approach to it (btw, I still haven't decided on my preferences ).

nice poam

I always enjoy your stories RJ. Reading about how young people live in this day and age is interesting to me. Keep working on that dissertation, too many people end up ABD after all that work on their classes.

I'm glad you found the videos informative in some way. It was never a real job of mine but as a hobby it was fun to do.

While I'm not your age, I'm not that young either, at least not by 2p2 standards.

And the dissertation is in final edits now, so it's essentially finished. Research completed and written up, all done but the fine tuning and the oral defense.

The Giving Tree was my favorite book I remember growing up. It got lost along the way somewhere, so I went out and bought it a few years ago and discovered all the rest of Silverstein's stuff.

Did you know he also was one of the creators of the band Dr. Hook? Him and several other writers wrote the songs and hired the guys in the band that became famous to play them. Some of his songs were Cover of the Rolling Stone, She was Only Sixteen, Freakin' at the Freaker's Ball...

Really interesting guy.

I didn't know that about Silverstein, that's very interesting.

What did you eat for lunch yesterday?

A frozen fruit bar and two granola bars.

Nowhere near as yummy as a meatball sub.

Don't troll her thread, Sirius.

Pics?

I have a fun history of injuring myself in slightly unusual ways. I have a scar on my eyebrow from tripping and falling UP a flight of steps, for example (although I was also drunk at the time), and another scar on my leg that I got as a child. We lived in a home where there were heating vents in the floor, and my baby brother would crawl around and pull the grates out, leaving a hole in the floor. My mom told my dad they needed to be screwed down. Anyway I stepped in one and the edge cut my leg down to the bone, it required 16 stitches to close. Interestingly in barely bled and I don't really recall in hurting much. My sister screamed bloody murder when she saw it though.

Far and away the most serious medical emergency I ever experienced, though, was when I was hospitalized during basic training for water intoxication. Most of the time when people in basic need to go to the hospital it's for an acute injury like broken bones (a woman in my platoon had her HIP break during a run, I'm sure that sucked) or a heat injury - dehydration, heat exhaustion, heat stroke and the like. This is incredibly common in military training, and more so during the summer months, which is when I did my basic. Someone gets dizzy or flushed, the drill sergeants take them to the hospital, stick an IV in them and a couple of hours later they are back with the company. They are incredibly cautious about this, constantly reminding us to drink water and halting strenuous training in certain heat conditions.

We were undergoing basic rifle marksmanship (BRM) training. Everyone needs to attain a passing score with their M16 in order to pass basic training. As such the importance of this training was heavily stressed, along with the usual warnings about being recycled (moved to another training company to repeat training) if we missed too much BRM training.

We were zeroing our weapons that day. It started off normally - wake up at the butt crack of dawn, breakfast, go the armory to get our weapons, crammed into a vehicle of some sort to get to the range. As was standard, I had two glasses of water with breakfast. Everyone did this. You had to drink one before you started eating, then finish the second by the end of the meal. l.

At the range I remember pretty constantly sipping water from my canteen. There was nothing else really to do. There were small groups of soldiers at each firing station, and while one guy was up firing, the rest of us were just standing behind watching and waiting. We certainly weren't allowed to talk to each other, so standing, staring, and sipping water was about the extent of our activities when we weren't shooting. I remember having to use the latrine (pitch dark port-o-johns FTW) twice that morning, so I was going through water at a decent clip, but nothing too unusual.

I zeroed my weapon on my first attempt, which means I was done firing for the day, so I was allowed to go to a set of covered bleachers. Around this time I noticed I was starting to get a pretty bad headache. Again, not really that unusual - as was required at all times on the firing range, I was wearing full battle rattle, which includes the kevlar, the military helmet. They aren't the most comfortable things on the planet, even with foam padding inside. I thought I just had the webbing a touch too tight. Also, we had been warned approximately 100 times that one of the initial signs of dehydration was a headache, so just to be safe, I kept sipping water.

About an hour and a half after I went to the bleachers, lunch rolled around (MREs - I drew meatloaf). The headache was getting worse, and I felt sick overall. Weak and achey and just generally miserable. One of the drill sergeants for my platoon happened to be at the front of the chow line, and after debating it for a bit (don't want to look weak, after all), I told him I felt like **** (not in those words of course). He immediately asked me how much I had been drinking (approximately 6 canteens down at that point), and after hearing that he told me to take my MRE, sit in the shade, and eat and see how I felt afterwards. So I sat under a tree for the entire lunch period, finishing another canteen with lunch. Suffice to say this didn't make me feel any better.

Once lunch was finished he asked if I felt any better, and I answered honestly that I did not. He asked if I could walk back across the road to the bleachers, and since the port-a-johns were over there and I had to piss anyway I said that I could.

I did not make it across the road.

Things from here on out get sort of fuzzy. I know that I basically stopped walking in the middle of the road and would have collapsed had my battle buddy not propped me up. Two other male recruits picked me up and carried me back to the area where we'd been eating. Another drill sergeant came over and asked me what was wrong and how much I had had to drink by then, to which I think I managed to reply that I had just started my 8th canteen. He took my canteen, poured a salt packet into it, and told me to drink.

Now, in general, I don't like salty foods. I never add extra salt to pretty much anything. So I wasn't too thrilled with being ordered to drink a canteen of salt water, but I forced down a couple of sips while I slumped in the seated position on the ground propped up by a tree.

Then I threw up nothing but water.

At this point they decided I needed to go to the hospital (and really not a moment too soon, as we found out later). While they went to get the truck, a couple of guys stripped off my BDU blouse and poured water on me, probably just in case I had heat exhaustion. I remember two people holding me upright while they were backing the truck up, and me telling them that I needed to sit down. I blacked out on my feet and was essentially picked up and dumped into the back of the truck for the drive to the hospital.

I was altered mental status at this point. I know there were people back there with me but I never knew which ones. I remember just lying there, my head pounding so hard that I thought it might explode. It was a 10 on the pain scale; the only reason I wasn't emitting a constant moan was because I no longer had conscious control of most of my body. I could not walk, talk coherently, or sit up. I thought I might be dying.

Another 30-60 minutes, and I very well might have.

Through a combination of over hydration and probably a baseline low level of certain key minerals, most notably potassium and sodium (which, if you recall your basic biology, are the two elements responsible for opening ion channels in your nerves, allowing them to fire and transmit messages), I had managed to flush most of the electrolytes out of my system. There was mild swelling of the brain from the excess fluid, which caused the intense headache, and the lack of electrolytes meant I no longer had conscious control of my body. My responses to questions (I later learned) were garbled or nonsensical. I started calling EVERYONE Drill Sergeant, probably on some level afraid that I'd get in trouble if I didn't maintain proper military protocol, which is pretty funny since I was clearly out of my mind anyway. My vision, hearing, and speech were all off line to certain degrees.

I remember a nurse getting mad at me when, while lying on the gurney in the ER, I suddenly rolled to my side and threw up the MRE over the side. She told me if I felt sick I should tell someone. Which is pretty silly since I could barely talk and wasn't even aware I was going to throw up until I was actually doing it. Apparently I told someone that I had consumed 20 canteens - there was a note in my medical file - but I don't remember doing that.

I spent the night in the hospital with a hep lock in my arm but no IV (so why the **** they stuck a hep lock in there is beyond me) and was placed on fluids restriction and given a crap ton of electrolyte tablets. One of my drill sergeants stopped off later that night to deliver my mail and check up on me.

Obviously I survived the incident. I only spent one night in the hospital. They wanted to keep me another night, but I was absolutely paranoid that I might get recycled. This never would have happened - if you passed qualification it didn't matter how much training you missed, but of course they wouldn't tell you that because you need at least some training to familiarize yourself with the weapon and practice - and having already zeroed my weapon and there being at least two practice days before qualification, missing one day of practice wouldn't have mattered. But I was pretty adamant I didn't want to stay, so despite the fact that my blood pressure on release was 70/40 I was given a temporary profile restricting my activities (4 days no run/jump/march, 7 days no direct sunlight IIRC) and released the next day around noon.

It took me a few days to completely recover my strength, and for the next week or so, I had a drill sergeant monitoring me to make sure I ate enough and put salt on my food. Someone started the rumor that I was trying to starve myself and that I hadn't been eating much AT ALL, which wasn't true. I just wasn't eating a very diverse amount of food, my main criteria being how fast can I chew this, not how balanced is my diet. Anyway for like a week I just got something with every meal that I didn't really intend to eat and when the drill sergeants checked, I'd salt the hell out of it then throw it away when it was my turn to get up. The run/jump/march restriction didn't mean much - we weren't doing regular PT during BRM (so no running or jumping), and no marching just means you walk behind the main formation without being forced to keep a specific cadence. The sunlight restriction was fairly funny - we walked outside everywhere, how the hell are you supposed to avoid the sun? - but in practice it did mean that when we were going to have to stand in formation for a while, I'd be told to go find a place to sit in the shade while we waited. This lasted approximately 3 days before everyone sort of forgot about it.

And that is the story of how I almost accidentally killed myself by drinking too much water in basic training.

I'm prone to muscle spasms. They started while I was still in the Army. They started in my lower back, and spread outward from there. Back, hips, sometimes my neck or my hand.

But until today I had never had one IN MY EAR.

It feels like a bug is trapped in my ear. It's not particularly painful, but it's annoying as ****. A quick Google search tells me this is sometimes the symptom of an ear infection or fluid build up.

At least it's not a tumor.

Weren't you feeling extremely full when you were drinking that much water?

would drinking that much gatorade have been ok?

Afaik you have a PhD in psychology;

when did you start knowing you would want to get one, so you started the necessary steps (get involved in research etc)?

and how hard was it to get into a program?

Not that I recall. Unlike real life where the day would start around 9 AM, in this case we had eaten and were at the range by like 6 AM IIRC. Lunch around noon, 6-7 canteens over that amount of time wouldn't be that much over a normal rate anyway. They encouraged you to drink around a canteen an hour in hot weather, and this was Missouri in July, so of course it was hot, although that day wasn't particularly brutal by those standards.

Probably. At the hospital, someone told me that I should drink Gatorade at meals to help avoid this from happening (specifically the flushing of the electrolytes). But we weren't allowed to drink anything except water. Like you could get milk for your cereal but each meal was two glasses of water - not soda, not juice, not milk. Water. I told the doctor or nurse who mentioned it that this wasn't allowed in basic training and he just looked at me like I was from outer space. It's possible that was just something with my unit. I passed it along to my drill sergeant but I doubt it did much good. They told me I was the first one who had gotten water intoxication in that training brigade in several years.

Well, slightly off there - I'm finishing my Ph.D. (I'm ABD, but my dissertation is finished - I'll defend in the Fall) in Counseling, which is extremely similar but not quite the same. I can't call myself a psychologist.

Psychology was my undergraduate minor, so it's been at least an interest of mine for years. When the Army stationed me in Belgium, I was doing the orientation at all the different offices, which meant I had to stop by the Education office. I told them honestly that I doubted I'd ever use them - I already had a bachelors, which is what most people in the Army are working towards if they are taking civilian classes. They told me that the University of Maryland had a satellite program for soldiers in Europe, and they were JUST starting a masters in Counseling Psychology.

Normally, gradate work in Psychology is fairly difficult to get into. If you have decent grades you'll get in somewhere, but you have to cast a fairly wide net - the number of seats in any given masters/Ph.D. program is tiny compared to the number of applications they receive. But here was a program where they were struggling to get ENOUGH qualified applicants.

I figured worst case scenario, I take a few classes and don't like it. No harm no foul. Other than a small fee, the classes were free since I was active duty. But I enjoyed it, and frankly Belgium is a pretty dull duty station so there was plenty of spare time. Why not get a free masters? I finished all my actual course work while in Belgium, mostly online but a few face to face classes in Germany and Belgium. I lined up my internship for the Fall after I got out of the service (not sure how that would have worked had I stayed in) and got my masters in Spring of '06.

I basically just figured that since I was back in school mode, I might as well go ahead and try to get my Ph.D. At the time, I limited myself mostly to schools that required you to have your masters to enter their program, because I wanted a shorter program. This is funny because I've been writing my dissertation for three years now and I only have until Spring of next year to finish (I will, though - the dissertation needs only to be defended and final edits). I cast a fairly wide net in terms of psychology interests. I applied to Ph.D. programs in clinical psych, counseling psych, one in forensic psych, and one Counseling program at George Washington University (I didn't really get the distinction at the time). I applied at 8 schools, got interviews for 4, was accepted at 1 (and wait listed at another, one of my two top choices, which was a bit of a bummer).

Other than just researching some schools I didn't really do any prep, though. I wasn't published before entering grad school (although I had to write a research paper to get my masters). My background was probably very different from a lot of other applicants, since my work history was in law enforcement, but I saw that as a plus, and apparently so did GW.

Having solid grades and GRE scores is a plus, other than that just learning how to talk yourself up during the interview, and writing a good essay (if required) to get your foot in the door.

why did you not go to college after high school?