Saturday, March 24, 2012

Maru Counteracts Ego Depletion

I've been working all day but I'm not feeling brain-dead or depleted, I think because:

(1) I'm framing this as doing "my work" rather than "coming up with a research idea for Monday's seminar" and working toward intrinsic (own) goals is less depleting than working toward extrinsic (set by someone else) goals; and

(2) I've watched this unbelievably awesome Maru video a couple of times already for replenishment (hey, it's Maru or Blue Bunny Bunny Tracks ice cream, you know?).  Note how Maru's right front foot looks around 0:32.  It's like the world's perfect furry cat foot (a white foot on a striped cat = gorgeous) mimicking the shape of an elephant foot.  Strangely, I was just last night mentioning to Robert that elephants have the best looking toenails of all animals.  Um, OK, yes that is inherently a strange thing to say.  But I don't know whether thinking of elephant toenails primed me to see an elephant-foot-like quality in Maru or what. 


Or possibly it's (3) I've used my mad psychology-magic skills to drain cognitive resources from Robert to increase my own power.  (This is a kind of mana leech spell, I think.)  Poor Robert had a bad headache for most of the day, and that was before he started working on our federal and two state income tax forms.

2 comments:

mom said...

Maru is a very hyper cat! But, it was great fun to watch him.

jen said...

So cute.