Mental Vacay

My job is demanding. It leaves me wondering on Sunday nights why I didn't go into fashion. Everyone tells me I should be - even people who are "in the know." Not that fashion isn't demanding...but Im so obsessed with it, it's like the biggest punishment hell job in the bizz would probably give me a chubs.

But alas, here I am with a shoddy audience, at best, releasing my fashion passion all over the place.

I've started my seasonal riffling of fashion-show-slide-clicking. Here are my favorites of what I've seen so far. More to come.

CLICK HERE TO SEE MY CURRENT FASHION CRACK

(I tried to embed it but had some problems so now you just have to click the ghetto link above)
xxx

Oh, and listen to this while you click away, My Little Pretties:




Then

Response Effort and I Fail the Simpson's Test

So the City of Chicago semi-recently pissed off the entire city by raising the parking meter rates. The whole city was up in arms and some vigilantes were going around in the middle of the night sawing off parking meter heads (which was awesome). So in retaliation the City of Chicago put these damn parking box's on every block...where instead of having a meter right outside your car to pop your quarters into, you have to walk your ass to the box, put money in and then walk BACK to your car and put the receipt in the front dash.

OK first of all, obviously this deserves a rant of what a pain in the ass blablabla..But I would like to make a small commentary on a variable at play called response effort. In the behavioral sciences, basically, if a response is too effortful and doesn't have a worthwhile payoff then the behavior decreases in frequency (goes away) and an alternative, less effortful response emerges if there's any sort of reinforcing outcome. What's at work here? Well, the City of Chicago greatly increased the response effort associated with giving them quarters. Causing people like me not to pay. Resulting in parking tickets. Resulting in more dolla dolla bills for the city. $$$$$$

I, candidly and knowingly, thought to myself early on: "this response effort is too high, I'm not doing it. I'll only be a few minutes."

I got away with it for months.

And now in the last week I've gotten 3 tickets. $50 bucks a piece. You do the math. That's expensive parking for an already expensive workout-establishment membership. Tonight, I accidentally left my debit card at home and had no quarters. And I was 5 minutes late for my pilates class as it was. So I took the pile of receipts out of the window and ripped numbers off of old ones, licked the back of them and stuck them on a receipt from yesterday (i.e. I made the 10 an 11 and the time a little later) - but it was too complicated to cover the time-paid-for, so I just bounced and crossed my fingers. I came back to ticket #3 and immediately had a flashback to college of when I couldn't register for classes because I had $400+ of unpaid parking tickets.

And then I felt like Bart Simpson in Duffless. Skip to the 10:19 mark. That's me with parking tickets. Dumber than a hamster.

http://www.watchcartoononline.com/the-simpsons-episode-416-duffless