THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

When, during Introduction to Psychology, we wind our way as a class to the section on abnormality and/or mental illness -- specifically, depression -- I ask the students to tell me the difference between a depressed person and a person with depressed thoughts. It allows me to talk about depression -- and in turn, mental illness -- in terms of identity and construction of the self, as well as all the other intersections of meaning that mental illness entails. In addition, it gives me a chance to talk about the Seligman et al. conceptualization of three dimensions of attribution --  Internal , Stable , and Global --  as applied to depression. From that framework, I tell the kids, I'm an example of a person with depressed thoughts rather than a depressed person. Of course, there are things that help elicit a greater quantity of depressed thoughts from moment to moment, such as reflecting back to a time when I had a full head of hair or could easily dunk a basketball with a coup...

I had the Saturday Night Live dream again last night. Over the past decade or so, I periodically have a dream that I'm a Featured Player on SNL . Of course, in this dream, I still have my full-time teaching job -- after all, one must be practical -- so I fly to NYC for the weekend so that I can, as a Featured Player, fill out the background in the dress rehearsal and live performance, with maybe a handful of lines that make it to air each week. And in my dream, I've been doing this for four years as a Featured Player, and I'm about to be fired, for, y'now, the obvious reasons of flying back and forth to contribute next to nothing for almost a half-decade. Like most people, I watched SNL off and on for a good chunk of my life. However, unlike most people, I went hard-core for a few years, never missing an episode, and getting attached to certain casts more than others. While I can certainly appreciate the talent of the folks at the start of the whole thing -- es...