Finalement!

So there I was... haunting Jer Z. my American Mistress : )) just don't tell Kansas! Anyway, I went back for my roomies' Halloween bash the weekend before last (and no, I do not mean my *former* roomies, since I still have at least partial residence there - in magnetic knife strip form) It was absolutely amazing to be "home". I was expecting the trip to be really fun and exciting, which it was, but I was caught off guard by how relaxing it was. I had no idea I was so stressed out!

As you can see, my gourd carving skills (depicted above) have really improved since last year. I also carved a couple pumpkins for the party (I know, I know, so cliché, but they were pretty fabulous too!)

And as you can see to the right, I'm not the young 24 year old I once was either. Fortunately JoLo coordinated the volunteer photographer to hide the wrinkles and grey hairs pretty well ; ) Fortunately I'm on the young side for my class here at McGill, so I haven't been too devastated about the ol' 25.

So I've started getting flack about not blogging about anything school related. In true Canadian fashion, all my research is top-secret, but I can tell you that I am *not* getting ready to run two new studies. The first will be adapting a paradigm my lab has already used to reduce stress in telemarketers. The idea is to train people not to focus on rejecting social information by giving them lots of practice. Check out the original to boost your self-esteem here. I'll be using pictures of only the opposite gender to see if it reduces dating anxiety.

The other project I should be running in the near future will look to see how instructions about how to approach a choosing between potential dating partners influences evaluations of who we choose. For instance, we'll ask participants to decide who they'd rather meet, partner A or partner B. Before they actually choose, we'll ask them to list what they might gain by choosing each person or what they would give up by not choosing each person. I hypothesize that people's natural tendency to use one or the other method will create a situation in which "fit" - making the decision the way you would naturally- will make you happier with your selection.

In other news, I submitted a grant application today that I'd been working on for weeks, and pretty much all weekend. So you can imagine my delight when I discovered my French word of the day is "finalement" or finally! If only my dictionary.com word of the day had been serendipitous!