Some people read about a disease and immediately come down with the symptoms. If you ever meet a Minnesota housewife suffering from ebola, ask her if she subscribes to Discover or Scientific American before rushing her to the hospital.
The Solipsist suffers from a variant of this condition. It's not that we want treatment for imaginary physical maladies; rather, we find ourselves envious whenever we read about subjects of psychological trials. Just yesterday, we read of a longitudinal study on temperament that has been going on at Harvard since 1989: Babies' temperaments were classified as to their anxiety levels, and since then the subjects have been interviewed every four years or so to see if their anxiety levels remained consistent--in other words, whether anxiety was more due to nature or nurture. And we wanted in!
We always want in on these kinds of things. We envy the investigative journalist who gets to have his psyche mapped. We wish we could be poked and prodded in an effort to establish our levels of depression or euphoria or psychosis. We want to know whether we are the kind of person liable to start a self-indulgent blog or if our own sense of self-importance falls within normal parameters.
So, here's the deal, if any Sloppists plan to conduct psychological experiments, you need look no further for your first subject.
I don't like this format. I have to concentrate so hard to get what you are saying while reading this white print. Why didn't you leave well enough alone? I liked the last format, the one you established in January/February. Please go back to it.
ReplyDeleteYou have an obsessive compulsive predilictive nature for white print on a dark background. Fine for advertising in short bursts, but not for reading. You are psychologically skewed to punish your readers. It's almost as if you want to live in a world of your own, a solipsist, if you will.