As I went through the door of my apartment, the opening between the literal wall of books at the entrance to our house revealed a brand new bookcase my husband had just made. Eight feet long and three rows high, it fit perfectly between the piano and the smaller black bookcase right next to my desk. The house completely filled with sawdust, we happily set out to finally fight back what I have started referring to as “the book invasion.” And, to our surprise and relative dismay, it turns out we filled the entire thing.

I did not reflect upon behaviorism until I was asked to read Karen Pryor’s book Don’t Shoot the Dog for my internship working with dolphins this summer. It did get me back on track with a theory that I had not looked at for a while, considering behaviorism is not all that popular in the human psychology department at Cornell (which is fine, I guess). But lately, I’ve been coming back to the typical thing you hear everywhere when you start studying this school of thought: Our society, as a whole, is a wonderful web of stimuli and rewards.

There are two unavoidable truths that many people don’t tell you, and if they do, you’re bound not to take them too seriously. The first is that the more you stress, the more you spend. The second is that the more you stress — unless monitoring it greatly (which can also be another factor for stress, right?) — the crappier you eat. Because there’s no time to do otherwise, and when there is, you’re just too tired to cook something healthier.

There are two unavoidable truths that many people don’t tell you, and if they do, you’re bound not to take them too seriously. The first is that the more you stress, the more you spend. The second is that the more you stress — unless monitoring it greatly (which can also be another factor for stress, right?) — the crappier you eat. Because there’s no time to do otherwise, and when there is, you’re just too tired to cook something healthier.

One of the most satisfying and interesting pieces of literature I have ever read is a twofold manifesto concerning an important part of the Mexican language: its curse words.

Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize recipient for Literature in 1990, wrote a 30-page essay about the verb chingar — I guess the closest thing in English would be the verb “to fuck” — which happens to be one of the most insightful pieces of Mexican philosophy and psychology I know.

I read it together with Carlos Fuentes’ chapter on the same topic in La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz), for a high school class. Both of these literary pieces started what I would possibly call my language reformation.

For the first time this semester I decided to stop by the Ivy Room for lunch on a Friday. I wasn’t too impressed. Rather, my spinner needed some serious work to be remotely what it was last year. Has it ever happened that you get in a bad mood if you don’t eat what you expected? I’m sure you’ve had the feeling before. And the tables, though more practical, gave the place the look of a school cafeteria more than its old medieval bar look. All in all, I would not take visitors down there anymore. Tsk, tsk.