And So It Begins

I have often observed that there exists an inverse relationship between the number of objectively interesting things going on in my life and the amount that I write about it. And last night I set up a blog. The implications of this are left as an exercise for the reader. (Yes, all one of you.)

I had been considering this for a while, but always pulled back, worrying about the amount of time I would waste on it. However, last night I fully realized that blog time would come out of time spent playing computer games downloaded from Yahoo and not spent, for instance, studying ancient Sumerian. Since I had just maxed out my character on Fate on the hardest level this weekend (leaving her descendant Van and his pet dog Skipper with a really impressive heirloom and such a reputation to live up to that Van has thus far refused to learn any martial or magical skills, purchase any weaponry, or go down into the dungeon; he is acutely aware of the moral ambiguity of killing colonies of dragons who have made the dungeon their home for decades just because some random guy aboveground is willing to pay to have them gone and has been considering taking up the life of a wandering troubadour and/or small-time dealer in funky herbs), and my new game Myth Match makes my eyes hurt if I play too long (shoot colored balls to make sets of three or more explode and thus shorten the snake of balls slithering quickly around the screen, occasionally stopping to watch some of the silliest game dialogue ever between a ferret who insists he is not a cat and various keepers of the sigils you are trying to capture through this bizarre ball-exploding quest), this seemed like a good time. Oh, and a friend of mine Who Will Not Be Named hasn’t updated her blog since January 7; I think I killed it by leaving a comment that her last post inspired me to dream about a Elijah Woods-esque rock star with a 12 year old girlfriend. This sequence of events has revealed to me the great power I possess by relating my random thoughts on the Internet. What can I accomplish if I have my own blog? Cower in fear, my friends.

Another motivation for me is that having finally gone through all the personal junk I had left at my parents’ house and brought some of it home with me to look at and in some cases document in some fashion before throwing out, I now have a bunch of boxes in my own closet instead of my mom’s old hope chest. (These boxes went through an interim stage of freedom in which they resided in my living room.) This blog could make a good forum for showing these choice and occasionally embarrassing items. Of course, I have also talked myself into buying a very small (pocket-sized) digital camera for this project and love the idea of being able to share earth-shatteringly significant documentation of things like the fine honey nougat named after me that was being sold at Central Market this past Christmas. (I was flattered but I actually don’t even like nougat.) So: photos to come.

When discussing odd blog topics last night, Robert challenged me to write about unicorns, as though that’s some kind of toughie. I mean, get a grip, man, you are talking to a person who once owned (in like 4th grade, okay) a t-shirt featuring a unicorn astride a rainbow (!) constructed out of sequins. I have read “The Last Unicorn” about 10 times and still am fond of it. A unicorn is a significant character in Zork II, which my mom played with me (and made a very nice map of), thereby demonstrating that at least one Infocom junkie in the world is not an irredeemable geek. I can write about unicorns for about 16 paragraphs and not even exhaust my own personal history. This is not a hard one.

I spent quite a bit of time at work today reading about Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (TpB) [and no, I have no clue why the p is lower case] in conjunction with a class assignment at the human dimensions of wildlife management training course I am taking in Colorado. This course involves four one-week sessions in CO and assignment/projects to do off-site. The course is a total of 16 graduate hours and at the end I will get a certification of questionable usefulness. But the course is free to me and to my agency (everything is being paid for by a grant which my agency ultimately funded to some extent, of course, government working as it does) and it’s become quite interesting now that we have moved past the wildlife management stuff and gotten more heavily into social science (the “Concepts” class is basically all applied social psychology), research methods, and stats. Actually, though, the wildlife part did engender a lot of fun controversy, like when the hard-core wildlife biologists in the class were forced to grapple with the potential consequences of democracy (e.g., that the public might eventually say who needs animals anyway), and I now know more about the North American model of wildlife management than the vast majority of the US population. (One consequence of this model is a dearth of American children’s literature featuring poaching of the lord’s game, but most people probably like the idea of wildlife being held in public trust.)

In addition to my reading, I was writing a survey – I know, this is a shocking revelation – using this approach, to be implemented on a sample of my co-workers (yes, doing these little exercises is a lot like being a psychology major all over again.) My investigations (facilitated greatly by now having access to a broad cross-section of peer-reviewed journals via my UT password) have addressed, if not actually answered, some of my immediate questions about the model (e.g. comparability to Bandura’s self-efficacy model, the role of past behavior or habit, the affective component), though I still have a lot to wonder about (e.g. the degree to which people generate beliefs that are consistent with their behavior rather than having their behavior determined by their beliefs).

Anyway, my main point is this: in reading Ajzen’s “Behavioral Interventions Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior” paper, I was struck by the statement, “It is an empirical question which of these two approaches will work better.” (I restrained myself from highlighting this in yellow, but could not resist boxing off the sentence with a pencil.) It was a nice confirmation that indeed, I am in my element.