Why did you buy that?

Oh boy! A year with a real income! Let’s see how we’re doing..

• Paid down $9700 worth of student loans. All private loans are now dead and buried.

• Saved up five months worth of expenses in the bank

• Bought a $1100 car last March
  

  Which as we all know, frequently turn out to be more like $3000 cars, in hindsight. Oh well. His name is Sheldon, and he is a 1988 Volvo 240 DL wagon.

I also learned a Very Important Lesson about getting a car throughly checked out by a mechanic before you take it on I-5.  No one got hurt, but I was pretty terrified of driving up until a few months ago.  I (mostly) fixed myself with the same logic I use for dog training..

Conditioning is some pretty strong stuff.  This was my theory:  Something scary happens, and you associate fear with a certain situation.  You encounter a similar situation (or something that reminds your brain of it, whether it is something that is actually dangerous or not.  Your brain is too busy being all “OMG SCARY!” to be logical about the whole thing.  Like the dog drooling when the bell rings.)

You run away. The anxiety is gone as soon as you’re away from the scary thing.  The fear is reinforced.  This is negative reinforcement in the operant conditioning sense - you take something away (the fear) which reinforces the behavior (avoiding the scary thing.)  The next time you see the scary thing, you have an even bigger fear response.  Which gets reinforced yet again, because you run away from it, which relieves the fear.  Repeat this enough, and you’ll end up with panic attacks (for some people at least, I think this is how agoraphobia starts.)  I didn’t want to end up hiding in my house for the rest of my life (which was a distinct possibility.)  So I started small.

Even though I was Very Scared, I drove to the grocery store down the street.  Nothing happened.  Then even though I was Very Scared, I drove a little further.  Nothing happened.  And then to work.  And to the gas station.  And to knit night.  And then on the highway during the day in the right lane.  And then at night.  and in the rain.  And then to the airport. And to the coast.  And before I knew it, I was passing people on 217 on the way to Corvallis.  If you go long enough without reinforcing a behavior, it will extinguish itself.  I also bought myself a car GPS, which helped immensely, and worked on establishing some incompatible behaviors (like singing in the car.)  So I am a huge clicker training nerd.  However, it worked, and I’m immensely proud of myself.

Other things I did this year:

Cooked a ton of food in my kitchen.

Ate cake on an enormous boat.

Hung out with the very best dog in the whole wide world.

Hunted dinosaurs in Costa Rica

Played with vacuum tubes