Ok, writing. I started this a few minutes ago but apparently in Mozilla Firefox the timer doesn't work. Sorry if I end up submitting two essays. Right now I'm kind of hungry. My stomach is growling, I haven't eaten since seven-thirty this morning. I didn't use to eat breakfast, but now I do. One minute down. I feel pressured, like I have to continue hitting keys or I'm not doing as well as I should on this writing assignment. Which is strange because all I have to do is write something, anything, and I get credit for it. Is it cheating if I use the backspace key to edit my mistakes?  There are quite a few of them. I probably would type better and therefore faster if I slowed down, which is paradoxical but true. I am also sleepy. Maybe I will take a nap, except I have to study. Hooray. That's a thing about college that is hard to get used to - setting oneself to a schedule and keeping to it, studying and going to classes on time without being told what to do. I'm thinking about psychology and the hypothalamus, which is what we learned about yesterday. The description of the rat kind of makes me wish I was a rat whose hypothalamus was being zapped. Seems kind of nice, although dying of starvation doesn't sound pleasant. Maybe in this case it does. I wonder what it's like. Maybe conscious though takes a backseat to simple feelings of pleasure, like humans feel sometimes, in the throes of ecstasy (religious, sexual, or chemical). Maybe the human brain has a natural resistance to feeling too much for too long in order to protect itself from things like dying of pleasure. Quite a way to go. I am running out of things to write about and it's only been 5:30 minutes. My mind is becoming a blank. Perhaps I can shove something in there. Nope. Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub. I'm regressing back to childhood, oh no!  Forced constant thinking seems to have brought me back to my childhood, which is not what I would have expected. If you think about it, that nursery rhyme is kind of suggestive. I wonder why I keep bringing up images and thoughts from when I was young?  Perhaps those, being learned first, form the basis of the psyche and are therefore more intrinsic to the mind than say, what I learned yesterday or what I see on MTV. MTV. I do not like that channel at all. I do not like it in a boat, I do not like it with a goat. I do not like it, Sam I Am, I do not like Music Television. The channel that proclaims to be that of rebels and anti-culturalists, but is really the mainstream mass-produced mass-consumed product that everyone thinks it is rebelling against. At least they encourage people to vote. That's a positive message coming from a negative source. I guess no one or nothing is truly evil. Well, nine minutes gone. I'm feeling stretched, like butter spread over too much bread, as Bilbo put it. Like everything in my mind has already come out and I'm squeezing a juicebox trying to suck the dregs of thought through that straw. Of course, with a juicebox you can never quite get out all the liquid, and I suppose it's the same with the mind. One thing I never understood about the mind is how one gets from neurons firing and connecting with each other to actual consciousness. In the textbook it seems like a step is skipped. An analogy can be made (and has been, I assume) between the mind and the computer. One could say, well, magnetic information doesn't seem at first glance to represent data and images and text. But the former is converted into the latter by programs, which themselves run on magnetic data. Where are the programs in the mind?  It's hard to believe that the human mind just coincidentally has the neurons in all the right patterns to be able to form speech and thought and movement. Where is the software?  I'm just rambling now. Although that's the purpose of this paper, isn't it?  Ha ha. I tried to read the book House of Leaves, I was told it was brilliant, but you know what?  It, for lack of a better and more descriptive and more culturally acceptable word, sucks. It's written in a nonfiction style, but the endless footnotes serve only to distract from character development and this won't make much sense to whoever is reading this if they haven't read it. Speaking of which, Hello, whoever is reading this!  I hope you're having a wonderful day. Although reading hundreds of stream of consciousness papers is not my idea of a wonderful day. Still, someone's got to do it, right?  Someone's got to do all the dirty jobs in the world, until they design an automated way to do it. Then the worker loses their job. Which is better, I wonder-- working at a terrible job, or being replaced from that terrible job and not working at all?  Some day, hopefully, we will have robots to do all our terrible jobs for us. We will become like Asimov's Solaria - thousands of robots to maintain a small human population. Eventually it will go to extremes -- millions of robots to one human. Or maybe not. What will be the point of civilization then?  What is the point of it now?  To keep people happy?  Great job so far, I must say. Nowadays people think that what they need to be happy is chemicals. More and more chemicals, pills, etc. to cure the imbalances in their head. They should take a cue from computer repair people -- the problem is just as often in the software as in the hardware!  Biological psychology will go a great deal in explaining human behavior, but it can only go so far. People who have no imbalance in their minds but still do terrible things or get depressed - what do we do with them?  Eighteen minutes, fifteen seconds have passed. Quite a while to be writing. You know, a second never seems so long as when you want it to be short. I love time's relativity, even though this isn't really an application of it. If only there was a way to have time speed up or slow down if we wanted it to -- now there would be a best-selling invention. It all deals with people's perception anyway -- I bet there is a way, somewhere. Although messing with brains like that probably isn't a good idea. Speaking of good ideas, my time is just about up. It's been a pleasure.