Stoned me just like jelly roll...

While I was away on vacation, I paid an artist to do a behavioral rendition of myself:



Yes, I am a rat.

At any rate, I would like to announce that I have hit rock bottom, financially. And like the psychoanalyst will tell you, "You have to hit rock bottom before you realize your problems." Although this mentalistic explanation is not helpful, I have forced myself to begin using Quicken to manage my spending. A simple behavioral solution, I'm going to attempt to keep myself together by managing my funds on my computer, just like I manage my schedule with Microsoft Entourage. See:




Close money management is necessary, well, for the rest of my life. Now is a great time to start, because I will have to be super keen with how I spend while I am in NZ. Better late than never, I suppose.

Since I'm in a picture posting mood, check out this strange picture my brother left on my computer:



Classes are going very well. I took my first test on American Sign Language today, and I felt like I did fairly well. It is definitely a lot harder than I thought it would be. The teacher spends most of the 3 hours using sign and not talking. It forces me to learn quick. I can sign a few basic things, like tell you my name, ask you what your name is, and label some basic objects like "door," "window," "man," and "woman." Deaf culture is interesting to say the least.

Another cool thing I will be spending some time on is doing a mock functional analysis. I will be operationally defining problem behavior, collecting the frequency of that behavior, and developing protocols to eliminate that behavior. I will also have to train my colleagues on all of the procedures. I am super excited to get started on this because I have always been interested in problem behavior. While working at Croyden, I never had the chance to figure out how problem behavior functions, and consequently we were never able to deal with it effectively. I would just continue getting scratched in the face while people said, "Eh, it's probably avoidance" or "It's escape behavior." Well, you really don't know unless you test the variables, and now I'll finally have that chance. Another experience to add to the curriculum vita...