From my blog in English

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I woke up 10 am today, feeling rather good. I had a distressed feeling about what to do today, since I had no special plans, not even for tonight. That’s the curse when you study a distance course (my course “prevention science” is a distance course, even though it is in Örebro, 500 meters away from my apartment). No lectures. No class. Just intense daily life with the main quest to kill time.

The international students are having a Toga-party tonight, and will be dressed in white sheets, hopefully with something under. I will not go, because I was out this Wednesday. I am too old to party two times a week. Once a week is enough.

Anyway, I went to the university and collected some course evaluation. No, it is not related to the course “evaluation science” I am studying right now. The course evaluations are a part of the tasks that the student union do to evaluate the quality of the universities courses. And I help out with that, for a little fee. It is far from science though. It is more of a formal thing.

Three hours of my day has been spent on evaluating the course “literature science”. Yes, there is a science of literature. Personally I am more interested in philosophy of language and linguistics, but that’s another story. The teachers seems to have done a good job, because the students wrote nice things in the self-administered questionnaire.

One question was “How much time do you study each week”. The mean answer was “30 hours each week”. That’s a good result, because usually they say that being a student is a full time job. This is not the case for me. Being a student is a full time job for me, but I don’t spend 40 hours on school work. I don’t even spend 20 hours on school work. A good week, I might spend 10 hours on school work. A bad week, I might spend 0 hours on school work.

As the sharp observant have noticed, this has to change in the future, if I want to do research, and take Ph. D. and stuff. I will at least have to study 35 hours a week.

I have a schedule, but I don’t follow it. I don’t know why. I have never followed schedules that well. When I write diary, I stop after a few weeks. With projects, I start them, but rarely finish them. Maybe it is some kind of disorder I have. Because I get unfocused easily and do something else.

Still, I love the way I am. And I am very confident that I soon will follow my schedule. I have to, because the alternative is to do nothing. And doing nothing, I should only do while meditating.

Todays push ups: 20

Jag har startat en blogg på engelska, som ett komplement...

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Thursday the 28th of January 2010 will not go down in history as one of my best days. I woke up with a slight hangover and morning anxiety at about 9 am. Probably highly correlated events. Not that I did something yesterday that I regret. On the contrary, yesterday at the club was fun and I danced most night to Lady Gaga-like music.

No, the anxiety has been more like a state of mind the last week. Something has not been right, and I have worried about things like travelling to France and being on TV. Things that are new and scary to me. The worry has returned again and again like a ghost, that really does not exist.

Not having anything planned for the whole day does not help, so I got dressed and went to school hoping to find my teachers. This is not an easy task, since I study on distance and only meet teachers like three times each semester. But since I live on campus, it is not difficult for me to visit their offices and see if they are home. Lucky for me, one teacher was home, and we started to discuss my paper.

The following two papers will be very important to me, since the doctoral application (I want to become Ph. D) more or less consists on these two papers. If they are high quality, there is good chance of becoming doctoral student. If they are not that high quality, I need to suck up to someone and sell my ideas, and still have a shot.

First I wanted to write about program evaluation and more specifically, how program components could be evaluated to improve the prevention programs. I study prevention science, which is a kind of social science I guess... but I really am more interested in psychology. Psychology overlap much in prevention science though.

This idea of writing about component evaluation was well recieved, but would be difficult to write about, since most prvention programs do not evaluate the components used in the program. It would be more of an argumental paper, and this would be very difficult to pull off.

However, I had a few other ideas, and one that I am really thinking about writing about is a prevelance-study about social anxiety in school-children, and how it correlates with problem behaviors like alcohol drinking and self-harm. This information could be used as background when creating prevention programs to social anxiety, whick will surely be done more in the future.

So, that was a good thing about today, and the momentum started to change. The morning anxiety was gone.

Then, like the lazo fool I am, I started to play a stupid videogame, Football Manager 2010. After an hour the anxiety started to come back, but lucky for me, it was soon gone again.

Swedish Survivor was on TV, when everything suddenly got black. And no, I am not talking about a panic attack, I am talking about a power outage. This does not happen often, and it often leads to some confusing moments about what to do. Usually the answer is: "Light some candles and hope for power to soon be back". And usually, the power soon gets back. And after an hour the power got back to us.

But during this hour I felt kind of liberated. Like nothing else mattered. It was just me (or us, I should include my girlfriend here) against nature. And I felt a rush of motivation. To work out. To take a walk. To write.

We are so used to our daily life, and our daily pleasures, and our daily troubles. It is very easy to fall into routines, either good or bad. Like in my case, my thinking fell back to everything that could go wrong with a trip to Paris, or being on TV. Instead, we should take less for granted, and try more to make the most of the day. Like the power went out, and we had to actually do something to survive.

// Mikael Glännström

The Doctors is on the air, in the background. I glance at it and see a bunch of doctors who answers questions "scientifically". Yeah right... They answer some questions partially scientifically and some questions very subjectively. The hosts looks like models and have done much plastic surgery. Some segments are exclusively about plastic surgery.

Its ok with TV-shows about plastic surgery, but dont try to make it a scientific program. Its entertainment and its awful entertainment. I puke on it. It makes me sick. It raises the ideals people have. Ideals of perfectionism, a perfect health and perfect looks. Well, people will ALWAYS vary in looks and health. So, it would be nice with programs who also celebrates diversity and not only perfectionism.

They use scientific evidence when they feel like it, and ignore other evidence when they feel like it. Thats not science.